MINIs have ruined me

3406 Views 11 Replies 9 Participants Last post by Chris, Nov 19, 2014

uke

Discussion Starter · Nov 18, 2014

I've been without a car since my R56 blew up. Fortunately I can work from home, but I've been slowly going stir crazy and counting the milliseconds until who-knows-when in December when I will get my F56.

I finally snapped and rented a car. The rental agent seemed to think it was a nice upgrade from a bare-bones car (It's a Camry). It is a decent car, but driving it around I feel like I'm trapped in a soulless, zero-fun hamster wheel of a vehicle.

A couple of times I borrowed the kid's Honda Civic Hybrid (which I previously drove for 10 years) before I got the rental. I felt like a little part of me was dying every time I drove it. The Camry is the same.

I have concluded that the MINI has irredeemably ruined me, and that I am forever cursed to only drive fun, cute cars or suffer a slow lingering death behind the wheel of a boring, gutless normal car.

Anyone else feel ruined by MINIs?

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Stingray82

· #6 · Nov 19, 2014

I had been saving and planning for a Mini since 1979. They stopped selling them here in 1980 so I had to wait another 20 years. When the gen 1 came out I held off because I didn't want a Mini with a Dodge Neon engine. When the gen 2 came out I held off because I didn't want one with a Peugot engine. Now that they have made the perfect Mini, I am tempted to buy 3 or 4 spares and store them away so I can drive a new one for the rest of my life!

I am never driving anything else ever!

...and they will all be red with white roof.

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Stingray82

· #10 · Nov 19, 2014

Peugeot and Renault were sold here for a few years. They had a reputation of being rusty, unreliable and expensive to repair. Suddenly in the '90s they pulled out and even people with cars under warranty were left high and dry. All of the French made cars here wound up in the junk yard pretty fast. You would see them sitting there untouched because nobody could even bother to pick parts off them.

The Dodge Neon engine really isn't so bad but the rest of the car has a poor reputation so the engine has been tainted. Used Gen 1 and 2 Minis are piled up in dealerships all over Vancouver. They sit there forever with sticker prices close to or even higher than retail. People here like Minis but they are regarded as prohibitively expensive by most people.

The new price of an F56 is actually quite a bit lower than the typical price of a used R56.

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