It changed the way we looked at small cars almost overnight, and sent the designers scurrying back to the drawing boards - the Mini was little short of a major revolution.
We take a look at the development and subsequent life story of Britain's favourite small car...
A Brief History of an Icon
he Mini is the car that, more than any other, has changed the face of motoring forever. One cannot imagine a cityscape without a Mini being present, but more significantly, it is impossible to look at a small car today without seeing very real evidence of the influence the Mini has had on it. Back in 1990, a panel of 100 industry experts and commentators voted it the most significant car of the century for Autocar magazine in the UK. This sentiment was reflected by the readership of the magazine who, when polled, also named it the most important car of the century, voting it ahead of such cars as the VW Beetle, Ford Model T and Citroën DS.
But what was the reasoning for such a car to be produced, and by the terribly conservative BMC, of all companies?
Response to a crisis
In a word, the Mini was conceived in response to a crisis: it was created from the situation that erupted in the Middle East in less enlightened times, when the Arabs discovered that they could hold the world to ransom using their control of the majority the world’s oil supplies. The situation blew up in September 1956 when Colonel Nasser decided to nationalise the Suez Canal, which the British did not appreciate one bit. The British tried to stop him, the Americans pulled the rug from beneath them and the Arabs decided to close their oil pipeline across the Mediterranean. In the ensuing war, the Arabs blew up the Syrian pipeline that provided 20 percent of Britain’s petrol supply. The upshot of this was that all oil supplies from the Middle East would need to be transported in giant oil tankers around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, as the Suez Canal was well and truly closed. This resulted in oil shortages and the renewed popularity of small cars in Europe.
Due to the Middle East crisis, petrol rationing returned to the UK in December 1956 and people began to clamour for more economical means of travel. The sales of 900-1000cc cars quadrupled in the period from 1956 to 1957, while car sales in the wider market slumped. German bubble cars began to appear on these shores, and although they may have been awful to drive, with questionable safety, they did achieve more than 40 miles per gallon, which was the most important statistic a car could boast in those petrol-starved times.
One of the earliest sketches for the Mini design as penned by Alec Issigonis. Note how the car changed remarkably little between concept and production.
The Suez crisis came at a turbulent time in BMC’s history, when the company was grappling with the very real problem of trying to reinvent itself. Alec Issigonis had been working on a front wheel drive Morris Minor replacement, with transverse engine and end-on gearbox, before he was seduced away from the newly-formed BMC in 1952 on the promise of developing a supercar for Alvis Motors. This did not work out for Issigonis, and a call from Leonard Lord at the end of 1955, inviting him back to BMC, could not have come at a better time. Newly back in the fold, Issigonis built a small team of engineers – most notably Jack Daniels, his old associate from the Minor days – and resumed his work for the company.
In a parallel response to Herbert Austin’s disgust at the proliferation of motorcycle/sidecar combinations on UK roads thirty-five years previously, Leonard Lord viewed the popularity of bubble cars with the same distaste. As Lord informed Issigonis in March 1957, “God damn these bloody awful bubble cars. We must drive them off the streets by designing a proper small car”. At this point the emphasis of BMC’s new car development programme was changed from replacing the Minor to producing something new and smaller: a car designated XC9003.
A talented team
One of the first 'Orange Box' prototypes from 1957. (Picture: Ian Nicholls)
Issigonis brought Chris Kingham over from Alvis to join Daniels, and these three men set about defining the Mini. Kingham and Daniels were both extremely gifted engineers who not only made many of Issigonis’ ideas happen, but also helped keep his feet on the ground, without tying him down. The entire team comprised these three, four draftsmen and a brace of student engineers. For project ADO15 (the car’s code name was changed when development was moved to the Austin HQ at Longbridge), there was absolutely no question of this being a high budget affair – and yet the demands that Lord placed on these men were extraordinary.
For Issigonis, the car to emulate and ultimately beat in terms of size and packaging was Dante Giacosa’s FIAT 600 (a modernised version of the famous Cinquecento), for this was a practical four-seater which was contained within a size envelope only slightly larger than that intended for the Mini. The packaging solution employed by FIAT was to place the in-line four-cylinder engine out beyond the back axle and the luggage up-front. At the time, BMC were working on an advanced transverse rear-engined saloon in conjunction with ERA, and it is not inconceivable that this idea was mooted, but this package was not the line of thought that Issigonis wanted to pursue. He saw front wheel drive as the vehicle for his future cars, and the stringent disciplines involved in designing a small car had always fascinated and challenged him. ADO15 would be the first production car to make the point, because he had new ideas that he wished to put into metal.
The three most important figures in the Mini's development and subsequent success:
(left to right) Jon Cooper, Alec Issigonis and Alex Moulton.
Pulling, not pushing
Issigonis had proved with his work on the original Minor replacement he was working on before his misadventure at Alvis that he could package an engine and gearbox into a space that occupied only two feet of the car’s entire length. He could achieve this by mounting the engine transversely, which would give massive benefits in terms of packaging efficiency, but it created the problem of how the engine and gearbox would be accommodated across the car’s width; as the Mini was intended to be a narrow car, the engine with the gearbox mounted end-on would be very difficult to fit between the wheels, whilst maintaining useful steering lock. One way of shortening the engine/gearbox package was to chop off two cylinders from the A-series engine, creating an in-line, two-cylinder engine of roughly 500cc displacement. The end result was a gutless and rough engine, which was certainly not man enough for the job required.
Just when Issigonis decided to mount the gearbox beneath the engine as part of an in-sump arrangement has now escaped into the mists of time, but this arrangement was incorporated as part of the first Mini mock-up. Not only did it have the now-famous in-sump gearbox, but it also included special Dunlop-developed 10-inch wheels and tyres, Alex Moulton’s rubber suspension and the familiar Mini shape in almost the form in which it was launched, the styling being a scaled down version of the XC9000, a mid-sized Farina replacement that was in the early stages of development.
These three innovations were certainly the making of the Mini, and it is all the more remarkable to note that the conception of the car was such a rapid process: the concept moved from clean sheet of paper to wooden mock-up in just four months, with a pair of running prototypes being evaluated shortly afterwards, in October 1957. The two cars, disguised with Austin A35 grilles, were known internally as the “Orange Boxes” and were based at Cowley for these preliminary trials. At night they were thrashed around a well-used test route that Morris test drivers relied on for new car development, taking in a circuitous route through the Cotswolds. During the day, they were driven at the local disused airfield at Chalgrove, circulating around the badly maintained perimeter taxiway. In 500 hours, the cars covered 30,000 miles and this process highlighted weaknesses in the design at that stage.
Someone literally took a chainsaw to a Mini to produce this, but it shows very eloquently just how efficiently packaged it really is. The passenger area accounted for an unprecedented 60% of the car’s length, a tribute to the intelligent design.
The second wave of Mini prototypes hit the road in July 1958 and after a run in it, Leonard Lord told Alec Issigonis, with his usual candour, to “build the bloody thing”. From the airing of the first prototype, to the car’s launch in August 1959, only a few major mechanical changes were made; a reduction in engine size from 948cc to 848cc was ordered as a direct result of the fact that early prototypes had been clocked at over 92 mph, which was considered far too fast for the market the Mini was aimed at. The new capacity was arrived at by reducing the stroke from 73mm in the 948cc version to 68mm in the final 848cc incarnation.
Last minute changes
At this time, the engine was rotated through 180 degrees to face the bulkhead, so that the carburettor was now to the rear of the engine, instead of at the front, where it tended to ice up in cold conditions. According to John Cooper, the real reason why the engine was reversed, however, was that Mini prototypes kept destroying their synchromeshes after about 100 miles. Issigonis was reportedly very upset that this change was required because the car was faster in its original form. Why the engine was rotated, rather than Austin designing a more durable synchomesh can be put down to two factors: time and money - or more correctly, the lack of it. So, carburettor icing was cited as the reason for this reversal of the position of the engine, but the response of John Cooper to this suggestion was that it, "was a load of bull!"
Interestingly, the whole point of the re-orientation and the resultant introduction of the transfer gears was to allow for much smaller gears, which produced much less inertia, meaning that there would be less stress on the gearbox’s synchromesh. Testing had shown that even with this fundamental alteration, the Austin A35 synchromesh would not be up to the job, but because the development of the Porsche baulk ring Synchro would not be complete by the planned launch date, they went ahead with the A35 system, anyway!
The width of the car was increased by two inches, in order to improve accommodation for passengers and engine alike. It was also found as a result of all that flogging round Chalgrove that the body shell around the suspension mounting points was breaking. This led to the suspension being changed so that the rubber units would be mounted on their own subframes, front and rear, in order to lessen stresses on the structure, at the expense of weight and cost.
Wheel size was an ongoing issue at the time and when the Mini finally appeared, few critics saw the significance of this new, smaller design of road wheel – most were convinced that they could not work. Issigonis had furthered the development of the small car by working with Dunlop to produce a road tyre of record-breaking diminutiveness, a process that he had begun with the Morris Minor. At that time, the Minor had the smallest tyres of any volume production car – when Giacosa had conceived the FIAT 500, for example, he had asked Pirelli to produce special tyres to fit on 15 inch wheel rims. The industry average at the time was a much larger 16 or 17 inch rim size.
The question of wheel size was very important because the smaller the wheel, the smaller the wheel arch, meaning less intrusion into the passenger compartment. At the start of the Mini project, Issigonis had approached Dunlop, as he had done with the Minor, to develop a new type of tyre that would sit on a wheel that was 4.20 x 10 inches – almost wheelbarrow dimensions – and Dunlop managed to develop a suitable tyre for the car. The tyres that finally appeared on the Mini were 5.20 inches in width, rather wider than the prototypes’ 4.80 inch tyres, and it was as a direct result of the car’s unexpectedly good performance that this change was made.
As with all of the next two generations of the corporation’s cars, Alex Moulton was responsible for suspension system. In the Mini, he designed all-new rubber suspension units to replace the spring units that were employed in conventionally suspended cars. Moulton made great use of the variable rate properties provided by using rubber as a springing medium – the advantage being that in a small car, the weight difference between fully-laden and driver-only was proportionally greater than it would be in a larger, heavier car. These rubber “cones” were smaller than conventional spring/damper units, which meant that Moulton’s system also had significant packaging advantages.
In total, eleven prototypes were built, the final five being regarded as pilot production cars that would be used to finalise the specification and design details for the production versions. In April 1959, the first production cars emerged from Longbridge, quickly followed a month later by Minis rolling off the production line at Cowley. By June, 100 cars a day were being built, in order to build up dealer stocks in preparation for the launch in August. In total, the gestation of this car from the instigation of the ADO15 project to its launch was 2 years and 5 months. This achievement was all the more remarkable when one considers that the Mini did not follow any other car’s design concepts and was a totally new idea that was implemented in a totally new way.
Into the limelight
1959 Morris Mini-Minor: pure, unspoiled Mini. Along with the Austin Se7en, this car caused an absolute sensation when launched during August 1959. People took a long time to latch on to the fact that something so small could accommodate four fully-grown adults and their luggage.
When the press first got their hands on BMC’s new car, they were not shy to praise it; the Mini’s unique personality, exceptional space efficiency, relatively good performance and tenacious front-wheel-drive handling meant that it was a sure fire hit with the critics. It swept aside the conservatism that was rife in the corporation and the perception of BMC in the public’s eye was changed indelibly. In its first year of production, the Mini overtook the Morris Minor as the corporation’s bestseller, but it was not all plain sailing for the Issigonis box.
Minimalistic interior: although this is a 1967 Morris Mini Cooper 'S' MkII, it is still an extremely functional design. This Mini received a remote gearchange and more comprehensive instumentation over the original. Note the sliding windows and huge door-bins - made obsolete a year later by the later wind-up-windows Minis (known as the ADO20).
The initial problem, as far as UK sales were concerned, was that the Mini was considered too clever and too small for the typical customer that Leonard Lord had designed the car for. Many buyers were from the “blue collar” end of the social spectrum and adjudged the Mini as not for them – how could a car so small have room for them and their families? This response reflects the age-old buyer’s attitude that size is equal to status, and many decided that for the same money they could buy the larger and simpler Ford 100E Popular or Austin A40. No matter that Ford’s runabout was no roomier, had far poorer road-holding and was slower – it was a known quantity to the man in the street.
The other setback for the Mini was that as a car with an accelerated development programme, its reliability was somewhat questionable, and there were some design flaws that became apparent very quickly. The most famous of these early teething troubles was what was known back then as the “great floating carpet epic”. If driven in the rain, the carpets would soon emit a musty odour, which coupled with the squelching sounds they made when one stood on them, meant only one thing: water ingress. The engineers grappled with this problem for some time before the cause was traced to the late addition of a reinforcing box sill to the outer edge of the body, through which water was trickling. What made this all the more painful for BMC was that the only solution to the problem was an expensive re-design of the floorpan.
Landmarks
By December 1962, half a million Minis had been built
By 1965, that had doubled to one million...
...and in 1969, that had doubled again. The expressions on George Turnbull's
(left) and Alec Issigonis' faces tell us all we need to know...
Other problems included internal oil leaks that sprayed the clutch plate; a mis-specified synchromesh that resulted in crunchy gear changes; exposed plugs and distributor at the front of the engine, which had Minis spluttering to a halt in the rain – water again! Not to mention a floor mounted starter switch that would also get a soaking, with predictable results. So, the early customers were acting as unpaid development engineers for BMC, and it was lucky for the corporation that the Mini’s design was so intrinsically right that these early setbacks did not push the car under and result in BMC reverting to the production of stolid and uninspiring cars.
All these problems were eventually licked, but it did mean that sales were slower to pick up than Leonard Lord had first expected.
Race on Sunday, sell on Monday...
The Riley Elf (along with its brother, the Wolseley Hornet) was the first of two attempts (the second, being the Clubman, pictured below) to extend the Mini concept by lengthening it: the structural modifications to the Mini were all aft of the B-pillar, where out back a saloon-type boot was added. One advantage of the Riley (and Wolseley) front-end treatment, was the full-depth radiator grille, which allowed for improved under-bonnet access when compared with the standard item.
Be that as it may, while the average man in the street remained largely ignorant of the Mini’s strong points, other people began to notice them – most notably John Cooper. Cooper was aware of the car’s basic strengths, as both his Formula One drivers, Jack Brabham and Bruce McLaren drove and raved about Minis, and Cooper himself knew all about the tuning potential of the A-series engine following his experiences with it in his Formula Junior cars. Cooper made tentative approaches to Issigonis in 1960, selling the idea of a high performance variation of the Mini, but Sir Alec was still harbouring a dream that his Mini was a car for everyman and as such was not that keen on it being seen as a performance car. Such was Cooper’s persistence that he ended up going over his colleague Issigonis’ head and straight to George Harriman, explaining the advantages of his idea. After a brief meeting Harriman told John Cooper to go away and build the car, but as Cooper later recalled with one proviso: “Harriman said that we had to make 1000 – but we eventually made 150,000!”
The Mini Cooper eventually went on to become part of motoring folklore, amassing countless rally wins, particularly in the Monte Carlo, where the Cooper performed remarkable feats of giant killing. On the road, the Mini Cooper was also a remarkable success, becoming the performance car for a generation; but considering the car was such a success, it seems all the more sad that the BMC-Cooper arrangement was never made official, and John Cooper only earned a £2 royalty payment (plus reasonably healthy retainer) for the use of his name on each one sold. However, on the back of the success of the Cooper models, and the countless celebrity endorsements, the rest of the range received a shot in the arm in terms of sales success.
Development by marketing: how not to improve the Mini in two easy steps. Graft on a Maxi front end and replace the cult performance Cooper models with a de-tuned version. The Clubman was soon nicknamed the “Clubfoot” by Mini aficionados.
A case of limited development
Park a Mini of 1959 next to a Mini of 1999 and you would not see a radically different car, but you would see one that had been the subject of significant and ongoing development:
| 1960 | Range expanded to incorporate estate versions. |
|---|---|
| 1961 | The first Mini-Coopers appeared. Riley and Wolseley booted versions introduced. introduction of Porsche Baulk ring Synchro. |
| 1964 | Hydrolastic suspension incorporated, and then dropped in 1969. |
| 1966 | Wind-up side windows incorporated on Riley/Wolseley models. |
| 1968 | Synchromesh replaced and gear-change improved by having synchro on first gear. |
| 1969 | Clubman version added, incorporating Maxi-like front-end styling. Wind-up windows incorporated on the rest of the range. |
| 1971 | 1275GT Clubman-based model now the only sporting version after the Cooper S is discontinued. |
| 1973 | Dynamo replaced by alternator for the electrical system. |
| 1976 | Rubber mounting for the front subframe, to improve driveline “snatchiness”. |
| 1980 | A-Plus engine added, cars now built on Metro production line, Clubmans dropped. |
| 1984 | Wheel diameter increased to 12" in order to accomodate larger brakes. |
| 1987 | Special editions start to appear thick and fast. |
| 1990 | Cooper re-introduced. |
| 1992 | Lamm convertible version launched, Longbridge versions appear in '93. |
| 2000 | Production halted. |
| 2001 | “New MINI” launched, but is it the car the British would have produced? |
The tidily styled Innocenti Mini shows what an Italian styling house can do with a sound British design. In the context of the early Seventies, this was a pretty car, and it would surely have been a big seller had British Leyland chosen to build it in the UK. (Pic: Ian Nicholls)
This list of revisions is by no means an exhaustive account of Mini development, but what it demonstrates most potently is that the Mini was never subject to any major mechanical revisions, only minor mechanical running changes. There was never really any major expenditure on the Mini, but despite it all, the cars sold in greater numbers than any other product that came out of BMC, BLMC, Leyland, Austin-Rover or the Rover Group. The reasons for this are numerous, though the car’s long production run was a major factor. Management always found that the Mini was pretty much irreplaceable, but it was an easy decision for the top brass of any given time to keep the Mini in production rather than to replace it.
There were two very real opportunities to replace the Mini during its life, the first being in 1968. Alec Issigonis, working in semi-retirement, had readied the 9X to replace the Mini, a car that was smaller than his original, but was easier and cheaper to build, arguably more stylish and, amazingly, was more commodious, also incorporating a hatchback rear door. The company never seriously investigated the feasibility of producing this car – by 1968 BMH were deeply embroiled in the merger saga with Leyland Motors and the question of what to do with the poor-selling mid-range cars was far more urgent than the matter of replacing the Mini. In fact, replacing the Mini was seen as a distraction, rather than an essential task to be undertaken. It was easy to point to the Mini and note that it still sold in large numbers at the time, but its non-development also showed a lack of forward planning by the new company’s management.
The non-appearance of the 9X is definitely the saddest of all the missed opportunities in this whole story: had itappeared on the market sometime around 1971-72, it would not only have refined – and redefined – the Mini, but would also have challenged the idea that the supermini should be quite as large as it ended up being by the mid-Seventies. In addition, it may well have ultimately had a wider market appeal, but it is certain that the 9X would have been more profitable for the company, as it was cheaper to build. What makes this whole episode all the sadder was that this car was fully engineered by Issigonis and production-ready, all development having been completed.
ADO74 and ADO88 notwithstanding, the other real opportunity to replace the Mini came in 1974 and would have potentially been a very inexpensive and effective operation. In the Sixties, one successful deal that BMC concluded was with the Innocenti company in Italy, who agreed terms to build the Mini and ADO16 for European consumption and become a subsidiary of the expanding British car maker. The Innocenti agreement was highly effective and made a fair amount of money for BMC, but by the early Seventies, the Italian management approached Bertone to restyle the car in response to the threat from the new wave of hatchbacks, such as the Fiat 127. The Innocenti Mini 90/120 were the result; a smart and pert small range of hatchbacks, the success of which led to the Argentinian industrialist and supercar producer Alejandro de Tomaso buying the company from British Leyland when they were at a particularly low ebb in the mid-Seventies.
It is not inconceivable that British Leyland could have also arranged terms with Bertone to use this body in the UK themselves, building it on a much larger scale and thereby producing a stylish (and cheap) supermini for the Seventies. In fact, British Leyland did consider producing a version of the Innocenti Mini themselves, because it was modern and at 10ft 3ins was only marginally longer than the original Mini. Harris Mann has since stated that this idea was quickly rejected because Charles Griffin had made it quite clear in 1974 that any replacement for the Mini should be larger inside, and the Bertone design clearly was not. Initial planning had also shown that the Innocenti Mini would prove costly to manufacture – even a run of 5000 a year would not have made financial sense – although these problems could possibly have been overcome. Archives show that Harry Webster was thinking very much along these lines, with his re-bodied Mini styled by Michelotti.
Good times, and bad...
Incredible as it seems today, the Mini was quite an unloved little car by the late 1970s, thanks to the arrival of smart superminis, such as the Renault 5 and Ford Fiesta. This 1977 cartoon sums up the mood of the moment perfectly...
Of course, it must noted that back in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the Mini was not regarded with quite the same fondness as it would be in later years, so the time would have been right to make the change and move the original concept forwards. Of course, the company was in a perpetual state of crisis between 1968 and 1980 and as such, did not seriously have the inclination to replace a car that was selling in large numbers. The major crises lay in the mid-range with cars such as the Maxi and Allegro and so, as time passed and the Mini remained in production unaltered, it ceased to be simply an old and inadequate car, and ended up becoming a lovable anachronism that was cherished by people of all ages.
In fact, the Mini’s best year for sales was 1971 (twelve years into its life, remember) when 318,475 were built and amazingly, in 1973 it became British Leyland’s best selling car – and would remain so until the launch of the Metro in 1980.
This probably says more about the weakness of the cars in the company’s mid-range line-up than it does about the strength of the Mini, but ironically, as the Seventies rolled on, the need to replace the Mini became less and less pressing, as it continued to bolster the sales of the company as a whole. The situation was compounded by the fact that as British Leyland worked on their ADO74 Mini replacement (see chapter Eleven), grappling blindly with the task of replacing the elderly car, the money ran out and the project was scrapped so that they could concentrate on the ADO88 Mini replacement instead. In these dark days, ADO88 eventually became the Metro, thus proving yet again that there was no real management focus when it came to the matter of the future of the Mini, at least not until the arrival of Michael Edwardes in 1977.
Enter the Metro...
Funnily enough, the emergence of the Metro in 1980 as the new de facto supermini for the company also safeguarded the future of the Mini. Production volumes for the Mini took a fall as people took to the Metro as the new, small BL car, but as Longbridge had been pretty much gutted in a massive modernisation programme in preparation for Metro production, the Mini was also a beneficiary. The Mini continued to roll off the same production line as its bigger brother and benefited from the economies of scale afforded by the new facilities. The 1980 launch of the Metro also marked the point in time when the Mini actually started making real money for the company with its fresh, new A-Plus engine and rationalised range.
Life was quiet for the Mini during the Musgrove years at BL, and as the company became known as Austin-Rover and new cars came on stream such as the, Maestro, Montego and Rover 200, the Mini tended to be quietly forgotten. Harold Musgrove intended for the Mini to finish in 1986-87. According to Simon Weakley, a marketing trainee at Austin Rover between 1982 and 1986, the Austin AR6 would be the reason. He said: "The AR6 was to be the only car to carry the Austin name, with the Mini set to be discontinued at its launch."
When Musgrove was replaced by Graham Day at the helm of the company in 1986, the death of the Mini was put on ice in the light of some interesting new market research results.
During 1985 and into 1986, Harold Musgrove’s marketing department had spent a great deal of time and money on a massive market research programme into the car-buying public’s perception of the company and its products. When the research was concluded, Graham Day and his canny band of marketing experts seized upon the results with great vigour and found that the wider public held the mistaken belief that the Mini was not in production any more. Those who did know that it was still a production model regarded the Mini with great fondness and warmth. These new findings directly affected Graham Day’s model policy and meant that the humble Mini was granted a stay of execution until at least 1991.
What happened next in the story of the Mini was quite remarkable. For the first time since 1980, adverts actually started appearing in the press for the car, headed by the saccharin-coated, “Minis Have Feelings Too”, Christmas campaign at the end of 1986, resulting in a rally in sales. After this, many and varied special editions, such as the Mary Quant “Designer” model and the Italian Job versions – available in red, white and blue – started to appear, no doubt capitalising on the car’s Sixties appeal. In 1990, however, a real Mini development was introduced in the shape of the Mini Cooper. It made a reappearance in response to sales of Cooper kits in Japan and also the management’s knowledge that the Mini was now a very real asset to the range which would sell in big numbers, especially overseas.
Cooper comeback
John Cooper was brought back to the company to develop his warmed-over Mini Cooper and Cooper S models, and sales of the Mini continued to rise.
1991 Mini Cooper S poses alongside a replica of the Sixties Cooper-S rally car. Rover boosted Mini sales significantly by resurrecting the Cooper name and before too long, the Cooper was outselling the standard version. It is not an exaggeration to say that the decision by management to re-create the Mini Cooper was an inspired move and helped to ensure the survival of the Mini into the twenty-first century. The Mini revival also led to the investment of huge amounts of BMW money into the creation of a replacement for the car – though whether MINI version 2001 is in the spirit of the original is debatable.
This re-emergence of the Mini continued unabated and when BMW took the reins of the company in 1994, some very real money was thrown at the Mini in order to maintain its compliance with toughening European noise and emission laws. The idea was that the company could keep the Mini in production as long as they needed to because one of the first decisions about future model plans made by BMW boss Bernd Pischetsrieder was to produce a replacement for the Mini.
In terms of the motor industry, the Mini had absolutely enormous repercussions. For the first time in history here was a revolutionary car that BMC could produce, that owed nothing to the designs and ideas of others. In fact, the idea was copied far and wide by all companies that had an interest in producing small, economical cars. The first company to adopt the idea was FIAT, who in 1964 launched the Autobianchi Primula. Like the Mini, the Primula was front-wheel-drive and transverse-engined, but differed from it in one very important respect: the gearbox was attached to the end of the engine, not unlike the experimental Morris Minor replacement that Issigonis was working on in 1952. Dante Giacosa chose this transmission package because he viewed BMC’s gearbox-in-sump arrangement as being unnecessarily complex and expensive to produce. It should, however, be noted that the Autobianchi Primula was somewhat larger than the Mini.
Subsequently, all small cars (with the exception of some Peugeots) have followed the FIAT formula of the transverse-engined, end-on gearbox package, but this does not devalue the genius of Alec Issigonis and his team: in simple terms, Leonard Lord and Alec Issigonis redefined the small car package as they wished it to be, and in doing so, altered the fundamental design of the compact car in much the same way as Henry Ford or Ferry Porsche had altered the concept of car manufacture.
The last Mini comes off the line in October 2000... (Picture: Ian Nicholls)
Thanks to Ian Nicholls for his contributions to this story.
Proofed by Declan Berridge