Photos by Julius Keller.
Yesterday I went and test drove Mini’s new ‘eco’ car at it’s launch in Melbourne. To be honest, I like the guys at Mini so much I would struggle to say anything bad about it however I got lucky cause there isn’t much wrong with this little car. Check below the cut for more photos and the full story (including how I managed to TRIPLE the average fuel consumption of other writers on the day!). Yew!
I’m no environmentalist. Sure, I’m concerned that we might be killing the world but I’m not of the apocalyptic mindset that would put a smile on the greenies faces. I have good friend who put it best when he said, “hippies won’t be happy until we all drive cars so boring we wish they still ran on petrol so we could gas ourselves in the garage.” Pretty right. What does concern me is the price of fuel and the fact that my current whip drinks juice like it’s running out (Oh, wait…). That’s where I got excited over this new Mini D. The Mini D is a turbo diesel with several neat fuel saving measures that mean, when driven correctly, you can actually achieve 3.9 litres of fuel for every 100 kilometers traveled. If you can stick to this, you will get over 1000k’s out of a tank of fuel which, at today’s price would mean $46 could get you from Sydney to Melbourne… beat that Jetstar. The car has a mechanism that shuts the engine down when you are stopped at lights or in traffic. The engine re-starts the minute you depress the clutch. This is a slightly unusual thing to get used to but no worse than the lag you get from the Prius when you press the accelerator. The car’s common rail technology means better combustion in the engine while using less fuel and combined with under body aerodynamics, lightweight components, volume flow regulated oil pumps and switchable water pumps means you’re going to use less fuel. But the biggest fuel saver would have to be the display which indicates the optimum gear for fuel efficiency. On a long, lonely drive I can see this being a great challenge to maintain.
Of course trying to achieve 3.9 litres would have made for a rather boring test drive so when I stood with the Mini reps and checked what the last journo had achieved (around the morning’s average of 4.3 litres per 100k’s) I set my self a challenge. I took off down Russell St. along Flinders St to Queen St. Up to the Vic Markets and back to the parking lot. There was a lot of traffic around so I didn’t get to test the top speed (195kph apparently) but I had quite a few opportunities to try the car from a standing start. Despite the engine-cut-out-fuel-saving-thingy I still had the wheels squealing up Queen Street – there honestly isn’t a massive change from the normal petrol Mini, certainly nothing you would notice on your average drive. Upon returning to the Mini crew, I found that I had managed an average fuel consumption of 11.7 litres per 100kms over the test drive! I was very proud. Still, the car can easily achieve the lower fuel consumption levels and on an average (calm) drive would out perform other comparable diesels.
Rick asked me the question “why would I buy this over a Prius?” That’s an easy one to answer. The Prius doesn’t drive like a car should. There’s no feeling in what you’re doing – no sense of being a driver. It lags during acceleration, breaks too heavily and has no feeling through the steering wheel. Being a turbo diesel, the Mini maintains that feeling of being a driver while achieving some savings for both the environment and the hip pocket. Not to mention the price difference between the two.
What would you pay for this? What do you think is reasonable? Considering that other normal (and far more boring) small turbo diesel cars sit around the $29,000 mark (Holden Astra, Peugeot 207, etc.) and a basic Prius will set you back near to $40,000 plus the fact that this car is backed by Mini’s design team and BMW’s engineering, I had round figure of $45,000 in my head. Nowhere near it. This one comes in at $33,000 – although I’m sure the people at Mini would hate me using the word, I would say it’s a bargain.
It’s hard to give more info from just a quick whip around in the car however I think this car is the perfect ‘package’ for someone like me who spends 99% of their time in the car driving through the city. It’s both fun and fuel efficient (not something you hear very often) and is reasonably priced. You can get more info on the car over the the Mini site here – thanks to Lucy at Mini for inviting me along and Julius for shooting the photos.
