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.
