A Small Idea Whose Time Has Come Again

You will be tempted to scoff when I tell you that the popularity of the new Mini automobile could be politically expedient. But it won’t sound so strange when I remind you that the original Morris Mini Minor on which the snappy new Mini Cooper is modeled was invented for just that purpose.

The Turkish-born Sir Alec Issigonis introduced the Morris Mini in Britain in 1959 to meet the need for fuel-efficient cars after the Suez conflict of 1956 precipitated an energy crisis there.

Here we are, fingerprints on a botched coup in oil-producing Venezuela, prostrating ourselves to the strutting Saudis and sizing up wildlife refuges in our own backyard, all for the sake of the petroleum we need to gas up those grotesque tanks the Joneses are driving to the mall.

Many of us have been bemoaning the behemoth sport utility vehicles in our midst for some time, hoping that corporate Waterloos like the Firestone-Ford debacle would pluck them out of the market. But it seems they are as popular as ever, if only because people feel they’ve got to “supersize” to survive any crash with the likes of a Chevy Suburban, which is bigger than most bathrooms. You could park a Mini inside one.

But why would you want to, when this jazzed-up version of the classic is so, well, cute? Now, you may ask yourself how something that costs $16,850 can be considered cute. Remember, we are talking about the funny-looking car British comedian Rowan Atkinson drove as the dorky Mr. Bean. Yes, Minis are comic. But cool? Even Volkswagen’s retro-chic New Beetle, which is cute enough to hug, never quite made it to cool.

But the Mini has, or so it would seem, since the waiting period to get one of the zippier S series cars is six to eight months. One dealer says his waiting list includes a 72-year-old woman and a 16-year-old guy.

Of course, a certain cachet does come from the fact that Mini is owned by BMW. That explains the shoe-box-luxury feel of the thing, the vamped-up engineering and sassy advertising slogans like “Goliath lost” and “Soon, small will mean huge the way bad means good.”

When you look at the vaguely Barbarella interior--all-leather with a few bulbous thingamajigs--you feel sure that an absurdly gadgeted version of this toaster will be featured in the next James Bond film. Or maybe Austin Powers.

So why is the Mini, which was never a popular car in this country, coming back? Well, first off, Minis did used to be hip among a certain crowd. John Lennon, Peter Sellers and Twiggy all drove them, and Mary Quant named her famous skirt after them; we’ve always been slaves to Anglophilic fashion. Think of it as British invasion redux.

The boomers are squarely in the midst of their midlife crises. What could be more appropriate?

It’s the same reason you’re hearing “Born to Be Wild” and “Teenage Wasteland” used in television commercials.

You can imagine enviro-friendly Bill Clinton driving one of these with Buddy II in the passenger seat, head thrust ecstatically out the window, canine cheeks flapping in the breeze.

Now just pipe in the Moody Blues and you’ve got yourself a multimillion-dollar ad campaign for the Democratic National Committee.