MINI Cooper Clubman S Order CANCELLED

Earlier this week I cancelled my aforementioned Clubman S order.  I was getting too wiggy about whether I wanted the S or the base model (horsepower -vs- mileage).

The folks at Northwest MINI were cordial and professional, immediately mailing me a check for the $500 deposit I had left.

MINI Cooper S has 60% Power Advantage

In deliberating between a MINI Cooper and a MINI Cooper S, you might wonder just how much more power the S is really going to deliver. For acceleration, what counts is the torque delivered to the wheels given a particular engine RPM. I figure the sweet spot for every day motoring is in the 2,000-3,000 RPM range, where the S has an advantage that ranges from 70% at the low end to 60% at the high. This is what leads people to say they have to shift their S a lot less. When they find themselves at a lower RPM they can just hit the gas and accelerate up to a higher RPM and so more power.



Next, I need to do the same graph for each gear, expressed as power advantage over speed.

MINI Configurator Drives Its Customers Insane

The MINI USA site has a nifty feature that lets you build your personal, highly customized, MINI. This "configurator" greets you at launch with a progress message announcing just how many possible feature combinations there are, and it rapidly grows to over 10 million! I don't care to admit just how many hours I've spent in this configurator exploring as many of those possibilities as I can, reading post after post on North American Motoring discussing the pros and cons of the features that seem most crucial to me, in the name of coming up with the perfect car for me. For good and well documented reasons, this has driven me insane. Too much choice leads to self doubt, worry, and, ultimately, unhappiness. The MINI Cooper North American Motoring forums are full of posts from worried folks who ordered a MINI with or without feature X and are having second thoughts. In contrast, buy almost any other car and you get to customize it minimally. The result is a car that is a lot like what you want, but you can blame imperfections on the manufacturer instead of your own stupidity at the "configurator."

This isn't unique to the MINI. I've totally lost the reference to it, but a furniture manufacturer in the 60s put out a line of completely customizable sofas with dozens or hundreds of possible combinations. Consumers could not handle it -- they didn't want to be interior designers, they wanted fewer choices.

Despite this, the whole "configurator" process is pretty fun, and could even be considered therapy for the indecisive. Once I started to go whole days without changing anything, I knew I'd settled on something I'd like. When I submitted it, my "Motoring Advisor" Mark suggested I go with a different interior trim line to compliment the roof color. There is no end! Perhaps I should ask Mark what color sofa I need.

Five month wait for the MINI Cooper Clubman begins!

In case you haven't heard, they made a bigger MINI Cooper, the MINI Cooper Clubman. Last weekend Karen and I carted the kids down to Northwest MINI and, to my shock and surprise, we actually fit in one. Even me, at 6' 2", fit in the back seat in a "could make it from Seattle to Portland" kind of way. This was in stark contrast to four years ago when I last tried to fit in one. We tried a regular MINI last weekend too; the kids complained about no leg room and Karen bumped her head getting out.

And so, not too many days later, I was back at the dealer laying down the $500 it takes to reserve a spot on their waiting list.