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I took a test drive in the new version just the other day, in fact. I had a few hours to kill while my '04 MCS was being serviced.
MINI really made some significant improvements, I was fairly well impressed with the car. The new turbo motor is much more refined than my supercharged unit, and with noticeably more torque off the line. The transmission is loads smoother.
Overall refinement of the car is way up, and the doesn't seem to have lost much in terms of driving feel. Steering is great, but while I like the sport button in general, the "heavier" feeling it provides felt fairly artificial. It's a bit less ragged feeling when you're blasting through curves, this could be a good or bad thing depending on how you feel on any given day.
As expected, MINI has available just about every customization option you could want. Even the anthracite headliner. (WTF BMW. You let MINI have it but not the rest of us?)
As I'm in search of a slightly more refined car, all these things appealed to me. However, I'm also in search of a significantly faster car with RWD, and the MINI falls rather obviously short there.
The only thing I can say that I actually disliked about the car is that the center-mounted speedo, which was cute if largely pointless in the older car, is now just really, really large. Seriously, it's easily twice the size it needs to be.
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