MINI D across Australia

The Mini is dead. Long live the MINI
Give me a BMW MINI over a BMC one any day. Because if the 50th anniversary celebrations of this most famous of automotive symbols prove anything, it's who really won the war.

Yes, WWII was dreadful. But three decades after the war, West Germany was full of shiny new houses, offices and factories making Wusthof and Henckels steelgoods, Grundig hi-fis and Blaupunkt tellies, Siemens and Bosch everything else and Porsches, BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes and Volkswagens.

Across the North Sea, the loveable Mini Minor was on death's doorstep. Along with the rest of the British auto industry.

In the postwar rehabilitation period, German technology and the technocratic culture of efficiency behind it turned its homeland into an economic entity of immense power.  But, still fresh from being run into the ground by mad men, it was left in no doubt about the importance of giving sane people a say in its polity. Which is why postwar Germany has been notable for the power of its progressive environmental politics…

Germany seems to know like few other nations that there's more to being alive than cutting business costs and maximising revenues -- that there are other interests to be taken care of beyond those of corporate insiders. The presence – and indeed the rule – of the Green Party has provided a counterbalance to the market extremism given free rein in Britain and the USA.

Under the influence of a host of incentive schemes to green up business and industry, it has given rise to massive regimes of investment, already well established among the indigenous auto brands, in making the product lighter, smarter and more efficient in myriad ways, strengthening the German brands' global market positions while those of so many other countries slide into the oblivion of the original Mini's creators.

And here's the rub: precisely because of those green priorities, Germany's auto industry is beating those of the free-market nations at their own game. It's gotten rich, but not at all costs.

There's a further kind of poetic justice to the chain of events that has come to put me and photographer Andrew Britten behind the wheel of a British marque resuscitated by Germans, and set to drive across Australia.

Churchill and even Chamberlain would be rolling in their graves at the thought of gerry-built Rolls Royces and Bentleys. More so were they to find out that in fact they're not built by Germans – they're built by chaps on the home front under instruction from across the Channel.

More humiliating still, though, is just how much better they are for it.

MINI is perhaps the case in point. A further three decades on from the war, it's alive and well and getting better every day. Only now it's not 'the Mini'. With the help of BMW's massive marketing machine, it's become just 'MINI' – a fully fledged brand rather than a body shape.

By the turn of the millennium, the industry was a mass grave. The British Motor Corporation and later British Leyland – Morris, Austin, Riley, Wolseley, Triumph. The Rootes Group – Hillman, Humber, Singer, Sunbeam.

It's not that the Brits don't come up with great ideas. And they have perhaps the most instantly recognisable national aesthetic in the automotive world with all that clubby leather and walnut.

Where they've always stumbled is in the execution. The British car industry is proof that Darwin was right.

Under Leyland management, Jaguar worked assiduously on V12s notable for their tendency to external combustion. Land Rover languished. In 1975 came the Ryder Report, commissioned by the government to work out what on Earth to do with the Leyland basket case. They nationalised it, keeping it on life support until Thatcher killed and filleted it.

Rolls Royce didn't die. The Best Car in the World just faded into dreariness and demolished its own value proposition.

Under Thatcher, Jaguar went to Ford, who've since dumped it into the burgeoning Indian wealth pool.

There was Rover, too, of course. BMW was so impressed by the brand it bought the entire Rover Group (Rover, MG, Land Rover and rights to use the Morris and Austin names) for £800m in 1994. In 2000, beset by huge losses on the back of product like the conceptually appealing but dismally executed MG-F, they spat the dummy, hocking the Land Rover subsidiary to Ford and selling the rest back to a management-run consortium for £10. Yes, you read it right: ten quid.

The high and low ends have fared better. Bentley has been extremely made over by Volkswagen; Rolls by BMW.

When it spat Rover out, BMW saw enough brand potential in MINI to keep it. And guess what – they've come up with a car worthy of all the adoration accorded to the original. Not for its flaws but – joy of joys – for its tangible virtues.

Which is to say, when all is said and done, at the end of the day, in practical terms, it was rubbish. Charismatic rubbish, but rubbish nonetheless.

There was also, of course, the Moke – without doubt one of crappiest, most pointless and downright dangerous vehicles to contaminate roads anywhere.

The Mini's charisma hailed from being fun to drive. You'd sit low to the ground but high in its thin pillared glasshouse, arms stretched around that big, horizontal tiller. For its modest exterior proportions, it had an enormous interior, at least until you opened the bottom-hinged boot.

And like all go-karts, it made 25mph feel like 75mph. From the sliding windows of the early ones, throughthe no-facia, no glovebox dash with the steering column exposed from wheel to floor, it was a study in stripped-down simplicity. Such humility was always going to carry huge appeal to a nation built on hard-man protestantry.

But if you're going to engage in the spartan act, you have to ensure the triumph of function over form. And when it came to function, the Mini fell flat on its face. In ways that, while fabulous to dine out on 30 years after the fact, made it a bastard to own.

Most famously in the electric bits. Why on Earth, when you reside on an island as precipitation-sodden as Great Britain, would you put all the electrics right behind the grille? Everyone who's owned an original Mini knows what it is to be stranded roadside in the rain.

And that's just the start of it. When there's that little between you and the engine, there's little point in having a radio. Less again when there's that little between you and the road, and you and passing air. And when there's that little between you and an oncoming daffodil, relax. You're off to meet your maker.

All this before we get going on the leaks, the squeaks and all the other hallmarks of British craftsmanship. This vehicle was the anti-Lexus.

There was a time when they tried to do something about the ride. They removed the springs and replaced them with hydrolastic suspension: rubber balloons filled with a mix of alcohol, water and preservative chemicals. These were connected by tubes through which the fluid was redistributed every time the car hit a bump. That is, when the balloons weren't bursting. Which they did. Often, and expensively.

Suffice to say that by 2000 the Mini, like so much else indigenously British and automotive, was dead in the water. And up against the likes of Toyota and co, it bloody well deserved to be.

Now, it has risen from the grave. Or so its new owners would like you to think. In reality, all they've done is nicked the name off the gravestone.

BMW has taken the name and key, high-level design language elements of Sir Alec Issigonis's original and remodelled the MINI in Germany's image. What we have here, then, is an impostor. Outside the realms of the aesthetic, today's MINI bears nothing in common with the car that inspired it. Bad or good.

Because if there's cause for sadness around any of this, it's that the MINI is no longer a people's car. It's a self-consciously premium brand.

But for now, sod sad! If we're to cross all the wideness and brownness that is Oz-zone in a MINI, give me one made by BMW in 2009 over one made by BMC in 1969 any day… There's a time and a place for arguments about authenticity, but it's not traversing the Great Ocean Road in a rainstorm, or hoovering up astrometres across the Dullarbor.

No, give me an impostor with air conditioning and a decent stereo system --with comfy chairs and proper suspension between my bum and the road.

A MINI with proper car steering wheel, not something commandeered from a government bus.

A MINI you can take out in the rain.

Oh, they make the impostor with a 21st century diesel engine? Can't be a bad thing.

240 Newton metres? Sounding better by the moment. And what's that – 3.9L/100 km? That's 75 miles a gallon, isn't it? Authenticity be buggered, I'll take it... And I'll try not to talk about the war. I wouldn't want to offend the Brits.

We'll tell you more about our MINI D adventure and MINI's green ideal 'MINIMALISM' in the next couple of days... In the meantime, to get you in the mood... Someone's put pen to paper -- in a very clever, very MINI way...