News : MINI launches new Seven edition

Mini Seven (1)

MINI has launched its latest model, the Seven. Taking its name from the 1959 Austin Seven, the MINI Seven joins the current generation range in five- or three-door form with specially designed exterior and interior looks unseen before on this generation’s model line-up. Unlike its namesake, it’s no stripped-out entry-level model. Sadly…

It’s available in Lapisluxury Blue and three other body finishes – Pepper White, Midnight Black and British Racing Green. A Silver roof and exterior mirror caps come as standard as well as door sill finishers and side scuttles with the MINI Seven logo as well as 17-inch light alloy wheels in exclusive MINI Seven Spoke two-tone design complete the exterior look.

Mini Seven (3)

There is also a MINI Seven logo on the central instrument which surrounds the MINI Visual Boost 6.5in colour display which also comes as standard alongside MINI Connected, Bluetooth Handsfree with USB audio, floor mats, MINI Excitement Pack, automatic dual-zone air conditioning and storage compartment pack.

The MINI Seven will revealed at the Goodwood Festival of Speed on the MINI stand from 23-26 June with orders being taken now. Prices for the MINI Seven three-door start from £18,545 and from £19,145 for the MINI Seven five-door.

Mini Seven (2)

Keith Adams
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38 Comments

  1. The five door Mini is a profoundly ugly car; not even a case of mutated DNA, more a case of engineered badge augmentation. My first car was a 1976 Mini 1000; this has absolutely nothing in common with it at all.

  2. The more I look at the MINI in all its incarnations, the more I would like to see an example with smaller wheels (say, 15 or 16-inch), less equipment and an equally less impressive retail price.

    I currently drive an MG ZR and despite the fact it is now eleven years old in terms of its build date, I find electric windows to still be a modest luxury I could live without, the air conditioning is hardly ever used and that MP3 player with autochanger for CDs in the boot has never been used. By today’s standards, most people think it is spartan in terms of equipment levels when compared to most other superminis. I think the opposite!

  3. During a recent mooch around my local BMW/MINI outfit, I came across a new bright red Clubman in Cooper S spec priced at an incredible £31k. It was big and ugly and very naff. For the same money you could be in the lower ranges of Evoque or Disco Sport. In fact some really desirable stuff could be yours for the same money.

  4. Close but not cigar! The Mini was meant to be the follow on to the 1100. Part of the genius of the Lord/Issigonis partnership was understanding that the Mini and the 1100 belonged to a family of cars and did not try (except for the infamous doors) to shrink an 1100 to make a Mini or vice versa. By establishing a new Seven BMW could have freed themselves from the trap they made for themselves. Alas it seems they have squandered this opportunity.

    • I don’t think they have squandered the opportunity, because if you want this platform with contemporary styling you have the BMW 2 Series and from 2018 the BMW 1 Series.

      Of course those letters might be BMC not BMW today if the genius of the Lord/Issigonis partnership had extended to making a decent margin on the Mini and ADO16 and a mid range product that sold in viable numbers.

  5. Is it not about time people got over the fact that the new generation of Minis are bigger (just like every other car on the road today), how many decades of successful sales will be needed before these owners of rose tinted glasses stop moaning about it when a new Mini is launched?.

    The fact is they sell well at a high price which can only be a good thing and if BMC, British Leyland, Rover etc had done more of that they might still be with us today.

      • Truth is the Ford Anglia was the car the intended Blue Collar customers bought instead, the original Mini was in the end a car for the middle classes wanting something trendy (as with the current one) and a 2nd car for the few at that time could afford such luxury (as with the current one).

      • I don’t think you need to be particularly rich to buy a Mini. In fact it is probably far more affordable than the original was in 1959. That’s the point, the combination of modern manufacturing processes and access to finance means that nobody needs there is no market for stripped out bare bones car. Today a well specced fashionable car like the Mini is effectively a car of the people – who actually exist today. Surely that’s a good thing?

    • The first and second generation MINI are attractive cars. The latest is pig ugly especially in 5 door and Clubman variants. To me the size is not the real problem.

      • That is exactly the point. I was not indulging in nostalgia (our last 4 cars have been MINIs – the last a 2011 Cooper S). On becoming grandparents we needed to go to 5 doors and wanted to stay with MINI. And that is the issue designing a 5 door Mini (or MINI) is like squaring the circle. However a MINI would sit quite nicely in the same stable as revived Seven brand. Or Seven from MINI or whatever.THAT

  6. I agree that each successive generation has got uglier. However, I don’t begrudge the success of the car. People want something that looks different to the run of the mill, and the Mini does that. The car is bought by the fashion-conscious and I suspect few such people while away the hours reading aronline.

    If you want a British-built car that provides maximum transport for minimum money, the Nissan Note is a very good machine and, to my eye, the latest model even looks quite cool.

    • Yes the current Note looks a lot better than the original one, which looks like the front & rear were the work of different design teams.

  7. I bought two new examples of the first generation of BMW MINI and really enjoyed them. There was a very active club “scene” around them, with very active regional clubs and well attended events.

    As time went by, the interest wained and the three major clubs in the SW have long since packed up and gone.

    I wonder how long BMW can continue to successfully sell a very expensive and largely impractical small car pretty much on the basis of an ever more tenuous styling link to car that most new drivers will never have even seen in the road. This whole thing seems like such a nostalgic dead end now and rather than still being very proud of my MINI, I would be slightly embarrassed by owning one now.

    Yes, it’s a success and it’s good to see Cowley busy, but the sales growth figures from the early days of BMW MINI production haven’t been there for years. It’s probably telling that they’ve had to resort to this desperate “special edition”, interest raising, nonsense so early in the model’s life cycle.

  8. Imagine you have been to the dentist, your mouth crammed with cotton, you look something like Brando in The Godfather. Imagine that, somehow, you have had cotton stuffed under the skin all around your head; your head is huge, your features still barely discernable, you look frighteningly like a monstrous version of yourself. You are the Mini five door.

  9. What chance a version with vinyl seats, no door trims, a full length roll-back sunroof and rubber mats on the floor?

  10. If the internet had existed in 1959, no doubt there would have been people moaning about the fact that the “new” Austin Seven didn’t look anything like the previous Austin 7.

    • Very good point, they would have to gone to the bother of writing an angry letter to the Daily Mail

  11. My point is the premise upon which the car has been called ‘Mini’, a contraction of ‘Miniature’. This car is not; at (at least) £20k, four metres in length, and 1.2 metric tonnes, and bloody ugly to boot, it is not a Mini! Don’t get me started on the Clubman…

  12. Or MINI is just a continuation of the brand Mini. Mini became a brand in own rights like the Princess. It does get so boring with people harping on about invented attributes of the Issy Mini. The original premise was to ‘drive the god awful bubble cars off the road’. It then became a fashion icon. Fashion icons have nothing to do with practicality (which the Mini had very little), handling etc. Many of you sound like the couple I met on holiday once who came from a coal mining town, they refused to use a gas boiler and would get up every morning to build a fire to heat the water for the house. This was in 2001. Time matches ever on.

  13. The usual comments from a MINI comments thread.

    I used to be a detractor until I came to the realisation that what we actually have now is something more akin to a continuation of an old Austin lineup, with the 5 door and estate equivalent to a modern 1100/Maxi.

    Even from a lineage perspective, the 3 door is bigger than the original Mini as it went through Metro/100 and 200/25 (R3).

    The hatch is a hoot to drive too.

    Bit confused though as to why this Seven is badged as a Cooper S.

  14. Everyone is right of course! It’s a finely engineered car and is fun. It is characterful like the Mi- hang on a moment, this has no character whatsoever. How can it be fun, this great lump? THE Mini drove like a go kart and was renowned for it’s space from such a small footprint. This is not a Mini. This is not a Mini. Zuhören und wiederholen…

  15. The clue’s in the name. Mini. Small. The original was cleverly designed to be tinier than everything else on the road, but practical, easy to park, cheap to fuel. It just so happened to handle well and become trendy too.

    Over time the trendiness took over and the last proper mini off the line was rather expensive and less practical, less frugal and less reliable than other things on the road. But it was still SMALL!!! Ya know, mini and all that.

    The BMW cartoon version isn’t small. I’m not sure what it contributes to car design. Everyone slated Jaguar and Rover for their S-types and 75 but the MINI escapes unscathed. It’s popular, profitable and I’m sure it’s a nice enough car, but it’s not mini. Because it’s too big.

    IF BMW had modernised the Metro and released a big fat one which sold well I wouldn’t have a problem, because the name doesn’t suggest it should be any particular size. But the mini’s USP was it’s ingenious size and design at launch.

    • Actually, the Mini wasn’t designed to be “the smallest thing on the road”; it was designed to get rid of the post Suez crisis microcars that were becoming so popular at the time. In comparison, it was a proper “grown up” car, with four seats, proper doors and a liquid cooled, 4 cylinder, 4 stroke engine. Consequently it was bigger and heavier than all of them that I can think of.

      • Which 4 seater cars with proper doors, liquid cooled, 4 cyl, 4 stroke etc were smaller than the mini? I understand the mini wasn’t the smallest THING on the road. I guess there were smaller bikes and cats and so on.

        • There were none that I’m aware of and I think that we may have had a misunderstanding here. The point I was hoping to make was that the car was not designed to be the smallest thing on the road. Issogonis was under instruction to build a small car to wipe out the microcars of the time, THE “cars” that Leonard Lord hated so much.
          However, Leonard Lord wanted it built as a proper small car and not, as with the microcars of the day, as scooter / motorcycle / car hybrids. As a result, in order to build it with 4 seats and a proper car engine, it was necessarily bigger than those microcars.
          I feel this is an interesting parallel with the launch of the BMW version decades later, where to meet the new acceptable standards of the day (such as a degree of comfort, modern performance and the ability for the driver and their passengers not to be turned into human pate at the merest hint of an accident), the car had to be built bigger yet again.

  16. Coming back to this article and forgetting the well trodden arguments about size, this 5 door MINI really is spectacularly ugly! It’s ugly in detail and it’s ugly in proportion.

    If everything that they design is hamstrung by the need to look vaguely like the 1959 car (a car that was never even properly “styled” in the first place and while it looks “cute” and nonthreatening, it was never good looking), how can the designers ever make any progress?

  17. Sure is ugly !
    The best mini out there today are the mk1 GPs+mk2GPs they are stripped out and have no gadgets hardly. Just like a mini should be.

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