MINI SE Electric: Hood scoop or nah?

I found this press release in the Motoring File's article, "A Look Back At The Best MINI April Fools Pranks."

It was obviously a prank because in 2002 the hood scoop on the MINI Cooper S was functional, so blocking it with lighting would have reduced the car's performance.

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall at the meeting in 2005 when MINI's engineers said there would be a cost-savings because the hood scoop would not be required for the 2006 turbocharged BMW MINI Cooper S. When marketing jumped out of their chairs, yelling "Now wait a minute! The hood scoop stays!", did engineering ask if it would make sense to put a fog light or driving light in the new fake hood scoop to make it more than just an ornament?


(Shouldn't it more properly be called a "centrelight?")

 

The 2006 still had a supercharger. 2007 was when they switched.

 

You are correct, it was the 2007 gen-2 model that switched from super to turbo. It was tough for me to postulate when the meeting where it was decided to create the fake hood scoop occurred. My logic was that because the turbocharged 2007 gen-2 Hardtop became available in November, 2006, the hood-scoop meeting probably took place in 2005.

 

If there's going to be a scoop, that's where the front camera should be. Or better yet lidar.

 

One of my fond memories of having the supercharged Mini was when one would go for a spirited drive on cold rainy days, and then shut the engine down. The hood scoop would steam like a dragon.

 

Car and Driver takes my side by absolutely disparaging the SE's fake hood scoop:

 

Not to mention the pointless power bump, really highlighted by that image.

 

Not sure I agree they were disparaging, just commenting. Remember some of us like it

 

Insightman, I thought of you when I read that article, and chuckled.

 

Yeah? When MINI's head designer, Oliver Heilmer, wrote to me saying he would take up my hood-scoop delete request up with marketing, I looked at all of Heilmer's designs before the production SE and I envisioned what must have happened at MINI headquarters.

Just before unveiling the production SE on July 19, 2019, after years of scoopless prototypes, sketches, and concept cars, MINI"s head of Marketing sent a memo to Heilmer: "The SE is an 'S'; the SE gets the scoop."

Heilmer must have jumped out of his stylish office chair so fast that he hit the ceiling. He stomped upstairs to the Marketing Department, but they knew he'd be coming. The memo had been sent from the golf course.

Heilmer returned to his office, typed up his letter of resignation, and emailed it to MINI's President, Bernd Körber, who had just started at that position a few months earlier. Körber, panicked and called the head of Marketing, was surprised to learn he was at the golf course and then called him there.

The head of Marketing got on his high horse and threatened to also quit if the SE didn't get the fake hood scoop. "Bernd. it's a friggin' 'S' fer John Cooper's sake!" Then he made the false claim that John Cooper loved hood scoops (none of Cooper's Minis had a hood scoop).

Not wanting to watch the company get torn to pieces just months after getting the biggest corner office, Bernd Körber agreed the scoop stays in the picture. Then he called Heilmer and doubled his salary if he would just calm down and look the other way when the ICE-inspired fake hood scoop appeared at the unveiling, now just days away. Heilmer agreed, but only if he got to design a super-modernistic, autonomous-driving, mini-van, even if it would never be built.

Then my humble to request to pay $1,500 if MINI would just put the less-expensive scoopless MINI hood on my SE ended up in the circular file. I was lucky MINI made the scoopless hood for the non-S MINI Coopers. I bought from my dealer and had my local body shop paint and install it a week after taking delivery of my SE.

Car and Driver would have used stronger language describing their utter distain for the fake hood scoop, but they didn't want to strain their relations with MINI.

 

Honestly the hood scoop offends me less than the BMW bucktooth grille. I was really sad when Karim Habib, head of BMW design, left for Infiniti in 2017 and now is the head of Kia Global Design (2019) after the whole Nissan Ghosn debacle.

If you want a little anecdote into the design and marketing at BMW you can listen to Anders Warming (former MINI head of design who took the flack for F56 and current Rolls-Royce head of design in 2021..after the 2020 podcast) at around 41:26 is when he talks about design and marketing.

 

Well teaches me to joke. Honestly quite sorry I replied.

 

It's okay we are all part of the MINI family. I'd still take hood scoop over bucktooth grille.

 

I, too, would take the hood scoop over that hideous BMW grille. Car and Driver photographer James Lipman found the solution:

 

Apparently the whole hood/grille thing was for European front pedestrian safety. The old E90/E92 would actually launch the pedestrian into the air...I couldn't find CCTV footage (wish I saved it) but the pedestrian went up 20 feet before hitting the pavement.

 

The look of the 2023 Bimmers is growing on me. Spacecraft, all of them. Much more avant-garde than a certain grille-less wet bar of soap brand.

 

Plenty of the soap bars in the UK.
And they DO look slippery.
I am not a fan of oversized grills. Without which it was very hard to sell a car in the USA. Until the rise of the soap bars, anyway. Gas cars don't need grills the size that most are now.

 

Yeah, if you check out the new Bimmers like the G87, or even the refreshed ones like the V8 G15, it’s mostly decorative. There are just tiny inlets and active shutters.

 

Well we will see what happens 2025 and beyond for Neue ("Noh-yeh") Klasse. Not sure about this full windscreen HUD and iDrive 9 (Android Auto OS..I think it was QNX before).

 

Love the hood scoop and it has 100% design/aesthetic function and it's very effective.