Next generation (J01) MINI Cooper revealed

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SameGuy said:
https://www.autoblog.com/news/mini-electric-cooper-and-aceman-for-us-market-scraped
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The key sentence from the article:
Simply put, SUV-obsessed Americans may not gravitate toward a Mini in the way they once did—a fact that makes the prospect of importing the Cooper and Aceman to the U.S. all the more laborious.

The article didn't mention the plan to build the Chinese EVs in Oxford. It appears Fiat is the only company willing to sell a small EV right now, with no contenders on the horizon.

I hoped Volkswagen would step into the gap, but VW's now in deep financial and labor doo-doo. The electric ID.GTI they teased seems to have been nothing but a styling exercise. CarScoops says VW won't even be able to "show" their Rivian-software-defined Golf until 2029. Fortunately, Rivian didn't insist their software works only with their headlights.

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The SUV-obsessed Americans have voted.
 
Meh. MINI is doing it to themselves. It shouldn't take three years to retool Cowley; BMW quickly added the Countryman U25 line to the Leipzig UKL2 plant where the X1/2 are made. They could've built a wheels-up Cooper Electric on the UKL2 platform if they wanted, instead of milking the F56 chassis for another decade underpinning the ICE Cooper F66. Instead they gambled on being able to boost their margins by having Great Wall produce a cheaper, Cooper-lookalike at Chinese cost savings while still asking BMW-premium retail prices here.

Meanwhile, Volvo had been banking on the tiny EX30 taking North America by storm based on a similar gamble, but with the heightened tariffs they quickly moved production from the Geely plant in Chengdu to a new line at their Ghent, Belgium plant. So instead of four years from its ROW release, they've been able to get Chinese-assembled EX30s to Canada more or less on schedule (after resolving software hiccups), with EU-built examples coming to the US in early 2025, just six months behind the Canadian release and about a year and a half after ROW.
 
Well an OEM would have to partner with a battery company to get a battery plant near the assembly factory. The Neue Klasse platform must be a huge evolution...
 
The Countryman SE is built on the same UKL2 platform – and at the same plant – as the ICE variants.
 
SameGuy said:
The Countryman SE is built on the same UKL2 platform – and at the same plant – as the ICE variants.
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Yes but they retooled the existing i3 & i8 plant and battery factory in Germany (Countryman used to be made in Netherlands by VDL Nedcar). Unfortunately the J01 EV platform doesn't play nice with the F66 ICE. Either the J01 is revised (to a shared EV/ICE platform) or the F66 gets cancelled. Thanks Brexit!
 
Right, that's why I suggested that they could have built the new Cooper on the UKL2 platform, which they claim is fully modular.
 
SameGuy said:
Right, that's why I suggested that they could have built the new Cooper on the UKL2 platform, which they claim is fully modular.
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Yeah, but I think they are leaning towards discontinuing the ICE platform entirely if they are bringing in the Cooper & Aceman for Plant Oxford.

That's why they are taking their sweet time with the ICE manufacturing at Oxford.
 
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It seems to me as well that MINI thought they could build their new EVs for cheaper in China, but got burned by changing geopolitical economics during development. And I suspect the next few years are going to be pretty chaotic for the US auto market, considering the world is moving to EVs but the upcoming US kakistocracy seems determined to undermine EVs.
 
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