Car fails of the century #4: the Mini Coupe

If you’re buying a coupe over a hatchback, you’re prepared to sacrifice a bit of practicality in the name of zingy handling and rakish style. But the regular three-door Mini Hatch has long been cemented as a) very good to drive and b) very impractical. Any potential Mini-badged coupe, then, needs to really smash it out the park in the looks department.

But 2011’s Mini Coupe didn’t. It wasn’t just more awkward than its related hatch. It was more awkward than pretty much everything else on the road.

At launch, Mini’s then-design director Gert Hildebrand proudly boasted the Coupe’s idiosyncratic roof design was inspired by his teenage son wearing a baseball cap back-to-front. Shortly thereafter, Mini head office decided the Fred Durst vibe wasn’t the one they wanted for their style-driven coupe, and quietly dropped all references to adolescent fashion trends, instead rebranding the Coupe’s curious headpiece as a ‘helmet roof’. This clearly stopped anyone making rude jokes about it.

Whatever you called it, it was ugly. Even without the colour-contrast roof (hard recommend), in profile the Coupe didn’t scream ‘slinky two-seater’ so much as ‘recently employed as a bar stool by a large pachyderm’. Buyers decided they’d have their impracticality and fine driving manners without the side order of awkward, and stuck with the regular Mini.

A nation’s eyes silently thanked them.