Road Test: Mini Coupe 1.6 Cooper S 3dr

You can't move in New York for famous people. The very first time I slid into the Big Apple's pulpy core, I bumped into Jack Nicholson who was on location shooting the movie As Good As It Gets. He played a grouchy obsessive-compulsive writer and later won an Oscar for his trouble. I'd only popped out to buy some socks. That's New York for you. Silliness like this makes it the greatest place on the planet.

So naturally I'm not the least bit surprised this time round to find myself enjoying a cup of tea with a top supermodel... outside a shop that sells Weetabix, Marmite, and that other Brit staple Vimto. All that's needed now is some fish and chips and a parked Mini to give the scene the perfect surreal Anglocentric twist. Oh look, there's a fish and chips shop and a parked Mini! You couldn't make it up.

Actually, the Mini is a brand new Cooper S, and, to be honest, I've put it there. The Mini has just gone on sale in America, and, to celebrate, Top Gear has been driving one around Manhattan. As luck would have it, we've stumbled upon a little corner of Greenwich Village that will be forever England.

In a city where expatriation is big business, nobody caters for homesick Brits better than Tea & Sympathy, whose original traditional English tea shop has burgeoned into a mini empire encompassing a grocery store and - as Jamie Oliver might say - a 'pukka' fish and chip takeaway. As well as being a solid gold business concept, T & S has also proved to be something of a magnet for New York's trendy set, which is why we find Irish supermodel Erin O'Connor being interviewed by MTV inside over baked beans on toast.

Now this being Manhattan, everybody is far too busy being cool to bat an eyelid. But that's to reckon without the impact of the new Mini. In fact, as impacts go, turn up anywhere in America right now in a new Mini and you'll be heralded with roughly the level of fuss reserved for earthbound asteroids. Tea & Sympathy's English proprietor Nicky - whose husband drives an old FX4 London taxi - simply can't believe her eyes. Soon her entire staff and most of her customers are standing on the sidewalk gazing in wonder.

"What the hell is it?"someone asks.
"A Mini," somebody else replies.
"A mini what?"
Erin O'Connor, who like most big-name models doesn't usually get out of bed for less than $10,000, is happy to sit in the Cooper S for free. "Oh, this is totally fabulous," she coos, as her friend and fellow model Jade slips effortlessly into the driver's seat beside her. From where I'm standing, I can only agree.

For 18 months now, the new Mini has been coming to America. Today, it finally arrived.

Not that it's a total stranger to these shores. When the Sixties had just started swinging, the first generation Mini accompanied the Beatles and the Stones on their inaugural US invasion. The music proved more durable than the car, though, and by '68 the Mini had been sent packing, a victim of America's emissions regulations. Its passing wasn't mourned, however - less than 10,000 were sold. Back then, nobody wanted to know.

They do now. With the sort of steely reserve we've come to expect from our transatlantic cousins, stories abound of US customers' manic anticipation of the new Mini's debut. In Las Vegas - a city that's no stranger to unusual behaviour - a large crowd of people were seen to cheer as the first transporter-load of cars were dropped off. At a dealership in Ohio, customers camped out on the streets to secure the very first available test drives. You wouldn't find many doing that in Salford. America, it seems, is ready to clasp the new Mini to its heaving, silicon-enhanced bosom.

That said, the Mini's US invasion campaign is not without problems. Principal among these is a chronic lack of awareness. While America clearly loves the look of the new car, that doesn't mean it has a clue what it is, never mind its quite unprecedented heritage. It's fair to say that a generation of kids grew up here for whom Sunday afternoons were rarely enlivened by The Italian Job on telly. In fact, BMW (US) says that, when shown a picture of an old Mini, only about two per cent of Americans had even a flicker of recognition. Without the visual prompt, the percentage awareness drops to a point the statisticians can't measure. This is what marketing experts call an uphill struggle.

So, how do you introduce a hot new car hardly anyone has ever heard of? Today, on the eve of the city's Auto Show, a programme of sustained activity is about to be unleashed on New York, culminating in an opportunity for the beautiful people to meet the Mini in Terence Conran's terribly chic Manhattan store. Movers, shakers, socialites, street-sweepers - the Mini must conquer everyone's affections. And in the car park outside the show's exhibition hall, local TV crews have arrived to record the day's opening salvo, Darlington's very own Russ Swift and his expertly choreographed stunt driving.

"It's amazing," he tells me, accent intact as he blithely executes another queasy J-turn, "loads of people out here remember me from that Austin Montego advert I did 16 years ago. Apparently it keeps turning up on those compilation programmes they do on US TV."

The years have not weathered the Swift phenomenon. A multiple world record holder, his ability to handbrake park a new Mini into a space the rest of us wouldn't fit into by any conventional means elicits appreciative gasps from the audience. Drizzle has rendered the car park as grippy as an ice rink, but Russ doesn't flinch. "It's a long time since I damaged anybody's car," he says, "and I'm not about to start doing it here." He doesn't, and the people are impressed. "It's gonna catch on," a burly security guard tells me, "that sort of manoeuvrability and shit."

In a plush showroom a stone's throw from the Hudson River, Tom Purves, Scots-born chairman of BMW's massive US operation, doesn't quite put it like that, but he echoes the sentiment. "The position for the Mini is a fascinating one," he enthuses. "It's a small car, about 12 feet long, and nobody has really been successful selling small cars in the States. So why should we be? Well, society changes, times are different, and I think this is a really clever car for the right time here in America.

"There is a small group of very influential, cosmopolitan American customers, who may have visited or lived in Europe in the past, and who have a terrific affection for the car in the same way that Europeans do. There are other customers who are more environmentally aware and who know that this car is twice as strong as any other car of its size, with an airbag for every foot of its length. They also trust BMW to build a high quality car. They know all this before they even sit in it. Then when they actually drive it..."

"They start doing handbrake turns around the supermarket car park?" I venture. "...they realise how much fun it is, as well."

Of that there is no doubt, especially if you happen to find yourself in one after a trip in the back of one of New York's famous yellow taxis, vehicles that are the opposite of Doctor Who's Tardis in terms of space efficiency. A Mini Cooper S is, in stark contrast, a thing of genius - one which, contrary to BMW's research, a surprising number of people seem to recognise. Our progress through NY's splendid concrete canyons is routinely interrupted by a constant stream of enquiries.

"Hey, new Mini, right?" a cabbie shouts across, as we both dribble falteringly through the traffic. "I used to own a bar in Spain and I had one of the old ones. Loved it..."

On Fifth Avenue, a bus driver abandons his passengers in a bid to get a better look. He grew up in Jamaica, where he drove an old Mini. A limo driver ferrying around US Olympic gold-medal winners tells me he used to race Minis, and how much quicker it was if he junked the SU carbs and replaced them with Webers. He grew up in Jamaica too. We meet a student who'd lived in Trinidad and Tobago. His mum had a Mini. Somebody else lived in France. They owned a Mini too. Then it dawns on me. In a city where almost everybody started off life somewhere else, the Mini will never suffer awareness problems.

This will no doubt please BMW, even if it contradicts what it thinks it already knows. The fact that one interested punter reckoned that the new Mini was a $50,000 car is even better news for the bean counters. Whatever, it's refreshing to discover that as the Mini returns to America after a 34-year absence, the company's top brass freely admit to making a certain amount of the launch strategy up as they go along. That's confidence for you.

"We've tried to be very viral," says Jack Pitney, general manager of the Mini operation in America. "We discovered that the people who really like the Mini hate to be marketed to. They like to figure things out for themselves. So we've been a bit more 'guerrilla' in our approach. Used the Mini website to promote a sense of community. You never know if that sort of approach will really work, but the buzz we've been able to create before we've even run a single conventional advert has been amazing."

Not that the new Mini's conventional ads are particularly conventional. New Yorker magazine's famous cartoonists have been hired to do a bespoke cartoon Mini ad. And for the first time in Playboy's history, in its June issue, the centrefold won't be a woman, it will be a Mini. "As far as the advertising campaign is concerned," Pitney notes, "the rule was that if any other car company could do it or had already done it, then we couldn't." To which end he's hired an advertising agency famous in the industry for dumping hundreds of body bags outside a tobacco company's offices as part of an anti-smoking campaign. Now that's what I call guerrilla.

The truth is that the new Mini will sell itself in America. BMW is banking on 20,000 sales a year, which is less than those sold in the UK, in a market eight times the size. This modest ambition is in keeping with the company's 'premium' brand strategy, and with Mini prices starting at $16,300, it simply cannot fail.

Back at the showroom, I watch a potential owner cast his eye over a Mini whose roof boasts not the familiar Union Jack, but the Stars and Stripes. It's the perfect embodiment of the new Mini as it heads into a new era. Oh yes, it's all systems go. America is ready for the Mini, and the Mini is ready for America. So, does he know what this brilliantly designed little car is? And if he does, how has the message been conveyed?

"Sure I know what it is. I watch Mr Bean all the time. He drives one, right?"