2005 Mini Cooper S Test Drive

The Mighty Mini

Is the Mini Cooper the car Scion wishes it could sell to twentysomethings?

Pssst, kids? Wanna buy a really cool car? We swear we won't pander to you. We'll just sign up a bunch of hip bands for a concert tour, and oh, by the way: Psssssssssst! Wanna buy a car?!!

This seems to be the approach of Toyota's latest marketing initiative, the Scion line. In case you missed it, Scions are Toyotas in disguise. Actually, that's not quite fair. They're usually Japanese-only Toyotas reengineered for American roads and American teen/twentysomething tastes.

The idea here isn't new; Toyota is afraid (with good cause) that despite its present success, it's going to be the Oldsmobile of the future. Its average buyer age is creeping upward, with lots of empty nesters buying Avalons and 4Runners, while "cooler" (aka younger) buyers shop over at Volkswagen and Honda.

What to do? Invent another car company. That's what the Scion offshoot is. What's fascinating about Scion isn't that it's a bust; it's a screaming success, actually. From January through July of this year, Scion sold 46,000 vehicles in the U.S. That's nearly as many cars as Honda sold through its Acura line in the same period.

What's remarkable about this is that the Scion was supposed to have a slow rollout, but clearly the brand has taken off faster than anybody, especially market watchers, expected. But we're also stunned by how a generation that spurns traditional marketing (hello, TiVo!) has eaten up the Scion with a big gravy spoon. Drive a Scion into a lot, and the teens swarm, especially the xB. Really, it's happened to this reviewer.

And we have only one response to that: "Sheep!"

That's right, we're calling the kids out for what they are, a bunch of babies who don't know when the marketing whizzes have them right in their dirty little mitts.

And what, pray tell, does all this have to do with the absolutely fun, fast, fuel-sipping, $16,449 Mini Cooper we drove recently? We think a heck of a lot. See, the Mini, although it costs about $3,500 more than the Scion xA, and about $2,000 more than the $13,680 Scion xB, is a way better car by nearly every measure. Style? It has that in spades. Handling? It will run rings around a Scion xA or xB -- although the new Scion sports car, the $16,465 tC, should give the Mini at least a strong fight. And by the way, this car has done quite well indeed in government crash tests (more on this below).

In sales the cars are pretty well matched. From January 2004 through July, Mini sold 20,419 Coopers (11,049 base Coopers, 9,370 Cooper S hot rods). For the same period, Scion sold 13,410 Scion xAs and 26,309 xBs. While those numbers are not impressive compared with bestsellers such as the Honda Civic and Toyota Camry, the Minis and the Scions are niche vehicles, not mainstream players. They are a good value, but their bizarre looks preclude them from being very high volume.

It is also important to note that July was the first month in which Scion sold all of its models nationwide. It has been slowly rolling out a sales network, region by region, in order to avoid being a flash in the pan and to stoke demand. The strategy seems to work, as xB sales have increased month after month. Sales for the Mini have been equally brisk. The Mini factory in Oxford, England, is running at full capacity and recently added a second shift to increase supply. The cars don't linger on the showroom floor. In an age where most dealers keep a 60-day supply of each model on the lot, Mini has what it calls in an Aug. 3 statement "extremely low inventories."

Our point is that this is the "kids' car" the kids don't see, because BMW's Mini (yes, BMW owns the brand) hasn't targeted the kids, and apparently the kids don't see what the marketers don't tell them to see. What do we see? Perhaps the best sports car value in history. And oh, by the way, if you drove one back-to-back against a Scion xA or xB, and you were 19, you'd never step back into a Scion ever again.

The details? Let us count the ways.