The 'experts' are bemused but the Minis keep on selling
Who would have thought nearly 50 years after its launch, the leaky, loss-making Mini would be a star performance for BMW, an epitome of high quality engineering?
Figures from the Munich-based premium carmaker show just how just how well the little car is doing.
A total of 126,810 style- and cash-conscious motorists bought one in the first six months of the year – 18 per cent more than in the first half of 2007.
Nearly 26,500 were in the US, where soaring gas prices are resulting in anyone short of a redneck to reconsider the virtues of his beloved fuel-thirsty SUV.
Minis are even outselling Hummers, that symbol of Top Gear-style, in-yer-face, over-the-top, motoring nonsense by more than two to one.
It’s not that Minis (bearing in mind the sickly dollar) are cheap. Nor are they that fuel-efficient. Nor is BMW is offering hefty discounts to shift them.
But if you are going to “downsize” to a smaller car, do it in style. When it comes to street cred, Mini has it in spades.
And to think that all those sage motoring writers told BMW it was backing a loser when it redesigned and re-engineered Mini for the 21st century.
BMW didn’t listen, of course. Instead it offloaded the Rover 75 (not a bad car by any means) on to MG Rover’s rump operation at Longbridge to make room at Cowley for Mini.
BMC and its successors may not have fully understood just what a winner it had in Sir Alec Issigonis’s masterpiece; but fortunately BMW spotted its potential and was prepared to back it with high levels of investment.
Those who bewail the fact that much of the UK automotive industry is now under foreign ownership should be made to think about the global nature of such a capital-intensive, cash-burning industry.
The likes of BMW, Toyota, Nissan and Honda looked at the post-war British car industry and decided they could it better.
Thank God they did. For without them we would not have an industry that in 2006 (the last year for which figures are available) generated turnover of £48.5 billion, accounted for 10.2 per cent of exports, employed 851,800 people and produced a wider range of marques and models than any other country.
Apart from the need to adapt to an increasingly eco-conscious car-buying public, the big problem facing the car industry in the UK is simply one of perception.
Opinion leaders, by whom I mean smart-alec London journalists, simply cannot understand why the country still has such a concentration of plants turning out high quality cars that people actually want to buy.
Carmaking is “smokestack” whereas the country’s economic future depends on “sunrise” industries, they argue.
Apart from the fact that there is precious little about 21st century carmaking that can be deemed to be “smokestack”, the “industry of industries” is still making a valuable contribution to UK plc.
So until the oil runs out and the lights go out, let’s just be grateful for all those foreign carmakers.
