Mini Cooper S - long-term review

It’s been long enough now – six months and seven thousand miles together. I can talk about The Screen, right?

When the Mini arrived I was spooled up for half a year of touchscreen hell, and expected you’d now be on the damp end of a category-five spittle-flecked rant.

But you need not back away from your device. Despite my general hatred for the car industry’s ‘put a screen on it’ blind alley, living with the Mini’s hasn’t been a chore. Mostly. We’ll come back to the flaws in a second.

First off, it works. Not a given, that. But after hundreds of start-ups, the Mini’s disc has never crashed, frozen, bricked, failed to boot up or – in other words – ‘done a Volkswagen’.

Second, it doesn’t sear your fingerprints off. It’s warm to the touch – car interiors get stuffy after all – but there’s none of that ‘oh God the processor is lava’ that you still get with some systems.

And after that tedious first day set-up – diving in and out of sub-menus desperately trying to figure out how to reset the trip computer or make the key unlock both doors – truth be told, it’s been pretty intuitive. I flit between Apple CarPlay and the native interface smoothly. I ignore the useless voice assistant and its disobedient dog character. I make heavy use of the steering wheel buttons to avoid tapping the screen whenever possible.

But there are some fundamental flaws which have been introduced from Mini’s mean-mindedness to buttons, and stubbornly sticking to only having one screen.

Stuff like not having all the information I want all the time. Because there’s only one central screen, you can’t have your trip data showing as well as, say, nav. Most cars let you show trip numbers in the instruments and then whatever you like on the main screen in the middle. But even this specced-up Mini with its head-up display can’t do that. I like to keep an eye on what my miles per gallon is up to while I’m going along. Because I’m a bit odd like that. But the Mini doesn’t allow it.

Same as with the rev counter. This is a hot hatch. It should have a rev-counter, because it’s not a base-spec Soviet runabout. But you can only have a rev counter in the instruments screen while in Go-Kart mode. Navigate away from that screen and you lose the tacho. Annoying.

And it goes on. Unless you’re in the climate control sub-menu, you don’t have access to the cabin air circulation toggle. And Mini has inexplicably set that to only last for a couple of minutes. So while grinding my way through London traffic, I’m constantly having to tap-tap-tappity-tap back into the air-con screen to stop the car merrily sucking in the fumes of the bus ahead and blowing them directly up my nose.

Amazingly, my partner’s 12-year old, 100,000-mile Mini Cooper has a button for recirculating non-toxic air around the cabin, and doesn’t decide to override whatever you’ve set it to.

Like I said, I’m a touchscreen agnostic. I understand why they’re useful or even necessary in modern function packed cars but I’ll never agree that they’re the perfect do-it-all solution.

But it’s not just me. Over half a year, it’s been fascinating watching passengers’ reaction to the circo-screen when they climb inside. Usually a coo of amazement, swiftly followed by bafflement. “Erm… can I have it a bit warmer on my side? How do I make the seat heater come on?” And so on. Feature-packed it may be, but I’m not sure it’s as user-friendly as Mini thinks it is.