Media post: The History of the MINI
European cars destined for the European market have always been small and fuel efficient. This is because, in Europe, gasoline and diesel fuel have been expensive to purchase for decades.. And, in the mid-1970s, the crisis in the Gulf of Suez occurred and the very supply petroleum was threatened. This really drove the message home and wasn’t long before the European automobile industry realized they needed to react aggressively.
Lord Nuffield of the British Motor Corporation (BMC) was one of the first to get involved. In the late 1950s, he directed his chief design engineer, Sir Alec Issigonis, to begin the design of a special new automobile. This British-built car would be larger than the other ultra-efficient microcars already on the market. It would be able to carry four adults yet be extremely fuel efficient. The car was appropriately called the “Mini.”
The first production Minis made their debut in 1959. It was the first mass-produced automobile to have a transversally-placed engine. By doing this, the Mini could be made smaller and this led to more interior room than previous chassis configurations. When the cars hit the dealerships, they flew off the lots. The motoring public loved this car because of its impressive interior room and sporty, fuel-efficient, engine. It wasn’t long before celebrities and royalty, including Queen Elizabeth II, were buying Minis and it became Britain’s ”must-have” automobile.
In 1960, the Mini was imported into the US market and sales continued until 1967. During that time only some 10,000 minis were sold. Unfortunately, BMC pulled out the American market in 1968 because of the new federal Safety and Emissions Regulations required by the federal government. A British car dealer we know, Land Rover of Naperville, IL, a full-service Land Rover dealer, says the original Mini has become the most popular British car ever built with some 5.3 million units sold. BMC stopped production in 1972.
Yet the Mini refused to go away. In 2000, BMW purchased the brand and announced a successor to the original British version. It is now called the MINI (all capital letters) and is built in Germany. The current MINI is 21 inches longer and 12 inches wider than the original and weighs 2300 lbs, a full 700 lbs more than the original Mini. Today, the BMW-built MINI is popular car with global sales of over 100,000 units per year.
The future of the BMW-built MINI is quite bright.
