MINI goes even further away from its roots

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If you are an aficionado of velour floor mats, MINI has just the job for you. Called the MINI Seven, it is supposed to make you hearken back to the original Mini which was released as a Morris Mini 850 and with another of British badge engineering brilliance, the Austin variant being called the Mini 7 with both released in 1959. (By the way, I use capitals for the new BMW MINI, and Mini for the original Issigonis designed car.)

To drum up enthusiasm for the “new” MINI, they have repeated an exercise done by General Motors in Australia in 1970 – fancy paint with even fancier names. The 1970 offerings included “Plumdinger”, a strange purple. There were rumors of “Come and get me Copper!” but I think that is stuff of urban legend. The new MINI paint colors include Lapisluxury Blue, Pepper White, Midnight Black and British Racing Green along with contrast Melting Silver roof. And that’s what happens when you subcontract the color choices to Womens Crochet Weakly or similar. By the way, there is actually no “official” British Racing Green (usually written as BRG) as the different countries adopted a color, such as silver for Germany, red for Italy and any sort of green for the UK.

New MINI 7.

The interior designer also went for fancy materials, including fabric/leather racing seats in Diamond Malt Brown and the velour!

Along with all the colors, your MINI 7 gets two-tone 17 inch alloy wheels, now there’s a strong selling point for you. There is an optional pack to add on LED headlights and other stuff, and VELOUR floor mats again

A range of safety features include active cruise control, collision warning, automatic high beam and road sign detection.

Engines are your choice of four on offer covering the 1.5 liter three cylinder petrol and diesel range and the 2.0 liter turbo four cylinder.

So there you have the “new” MINI Seven. Well worth your while looking this one over. It has velour floor mats.

Come on BMW, you can do better than that.