Mini Cooper S - long-term review

Time for a debrief on our recent hot hatch megatest (coming soon to TopGear.com, so stay tuned). Spoiler alert: the Cooper S, predictably, got savaged.

It wasn’t a surprise that it was the second-slowest around the track, with the lowest peak speed. The Cooper S only has 201bhp and weighs 1,285kg. Despite all the ‘go kart mode’ pretentiousness, no-one’s seriously expecting this to be a modern track day star. Even the most recent Mini GP was too bloated for that malarkey.

But while I was prepared for the Mini to feel bereft of ideas in the handling department and saddled with a flat, uninspiring engine – because I’ve been living with it as a daily – m’colleagues still expected some of the old fizz. The rear-axle-on-castors, super-playful balance and sharp throttle response that made the first two generations of BMW-reinvented Mini a blast to drive.

Ollie Marriage called it less go-kart, more ride-on-lawnmower. Rowan Horncastle described it with words that aren’t publishable on a family website. It’s always a bad sign when the track is open for business, the tyres aren’t worn out and the petrol tank isn’t empty… and no-one’s asking for the keys.

Like I said, not a surprise. The previous-gen Mini wasn’t much cop to drive: it had already become overinflated like a villain in a Roald Dahl novel, and weight had caught up with it. And this one is the same, reskinned. Except you can’t have a manual anymore. A shame, as Mini always made good ones.

But what the latest Mini does prove is the company is doubling down on the direction the car’s been going in for a decade. There was a fork in the road: to either keep the car sharp, pointy and raucous, or to build what’s basically a BMW 3 Series supermini. The latter is a stronger business case.

It’s the car you’d sign off if you were the boss of Mini, with factories to power and shareholders to appease. A premium, refined, feature-packed supermini where the looks are twee, but the character’s actually grown-up.

Cold-hard data backs it up… right? In December 2024 the Mini Cooper hatch was the fourth-best selling car in the country.  But Mini’s overall sales in its homeland were fractionally down in 2024. That’s despite new models like the Countryman and Aceman arriving. Yes, its EV share leapt up by 55 per cent, because the all-electric Cooper and Aceman came on-stream. Great news for the BMW Group’s CO2 average, and its sales force’s effectiveness in getting customers to transition into EVs.

But the Mini EVs are heavier still, and would prefer you coasted about with the ‘Experiences’ mode toggle locked to Efficiency than cranked up into three-wheeling ‘Go-Kart’. This is Mini’s new comfort zone. Big car feel in a small package. Techy, not cheeky.

The petrol hot hatchback’s days are probably numbered, but for Mini, they’re already over. This isn’t a delinquent step-brother in the family photo, pulling faces and mooning. It’s more like an accountant reluctantly wearing a party hat and reading the joke from a Christmas cracker, before pointing out the punchline is grammatically incorrect. Successful and smart, but ultimately a bit of a buzzkill.