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FLORIDA, USA – Like the metaphorical frog in a well, you can never really get a true sense of how tiny Singapore is unless you take a road trip in a foreign country. Specifically, a foreign country as large as the United States of America.

The scale of which you never truly appreciate until you’ve driven some 500km over two days and realise you’ve gone no further than several centimetres on a map. Of course, this is entirely dependent on the scale of the map, but you get the idea. 

So anyway, the trip itself was to pick up a MINI Countryman from Miami Airport and drive it 200km or so to the Florida Keys, including a small 100km stretch of the US Route 1, an almost arrow-straight finger of tarmac from Key Largo to Key West and back.

“Small” being the operative word here, because US Route 1 is nearly 4,000km long, the longest single road in the United States, running from Florida at its southernmost tip to Maine at its northernmost point. Nearly a hundred times the length of Singapore!

How’s that for big?

… With a really small car in it

Those distances seem all the greater, given our red dot-dwelling nature and the size of the car we were about to undertake the road trip in, the aforementioned MINI Countryman. 

The more knowledgeable members will no doubt point to how the Countryman is the largest vehicle MINI makes, but as with many things size is relative.

Just to illustrate our point, the Countryman’s stablemate in the BMW Group’s vast array of SUVs is the X5. In the US, the X5 is formally classed as a mid-sized SUV, where here and in most other places, it’s in the full-sized class. The Americans regard the X7 as a full-sized SUV, while the rest of the world recognises it as a leviathan on stilts. 

At any rate, the Countryman we were piloting was equipped with a 136hp three-cylinder motor with a 1.5-litre displacement. To say that engine is a midget in a land of giants would be an understatement. 

In the land of the large-displacement V8 (typically 5-litres and upward), the Mini’s three-cylinder engine is positively Lilliputian. 

… And how did it do?

Surprisingly well, thanks for asking. It’s telling that the little (in relative terms, anyway) Countryman never felt outgunned on those mythical American roads. 

Primarily because we either spent most of our time with it sitting in gridlock — you can blame the President Trump’s arrival en route to Mar-a-Lago coinciding with our departure for that — or on empty highways.

You can again blame the aforementioned Presidential motorcade for that one, since it meant by the time we cleared the Miami city limits and negotiated evening rush hour traffic, it was well past 8pm, with less than half the journey to Key West under our belts. 

Which meant negotiating the drive from Key Largo (the northern tip of the Florida Keys) to Key West in near-pitch darkness. 

All that also meant a serious mistiming of a turn and mounting the kerb fairly hard. Worrying, because a puncture in the middle of nowhere would be fairly inconvenient, to say the least. 

The general lack of visibility was a pity, because according to the map, the numerous bridges linking up the Florida Keys would provide an unobstructed view of the Gulf of Mexico, and if you squinted really hard, you might even see Cuba. Yes, it really is that close, a little over 150km, to be precise. 

Not that we really could in our two days with the Countryman, because we came up close and personal with…

The uncooperative weather

Florida is normally known for warm-ish weather and sunshine all year round. In a cruel twist of fate, however, we got none of that. 

On the first day we landed, we were treated to weather that was not only unseasonable, it was downright freakish. For Florida, at any rate. The temperature dipped to just below single digits, which also coincidentally had local iguanas falling out of their roosting spots in trees. 

While it might sound like a satirical fake news story, multiple reports on the radio and TV news confirmed it, along with warning the public not to move the iguanas themselves or stand under trees, for fear of injury. 

The day after, when we were about to depart Key West back to Miami wasn’t much better. What started out as a bright, sunny morning with temperatures in the low 20s soon turned to clouds and a persistent light drizzle.

However, one thing did make up for it, and it’s…

The people you meet

The best part of any road trip is perhaps not so much about the sorts of roads you drive on, which is no doubt important, but it’s the people you meet along the way that make it truly special. And boy, did Miami serve up some winners. 

Interesting fact about Miami is that nearly three-quarters of its population is Hispanic. A third of that number being of Cuban origin. The people we met at the bars and restaurants dotting Little Havana are populated with some of the friendliest people you’ll ever meet. 

Or even the random taco truck we stumbled across while on the way to Key West. Clearly, Carlos of Jalisco Taco Shop serves up his tacos come rain or shine. Which is a pretty important point, given we visited his food truck in the middle of a tropical downpour. 

But really, no American road trip would be truly complete without a visit to an all-American diner like Mrs Mac’s. Apart from one of our companions who ordered a Countryman-sized bowl of chili, the rest of the food there was sized like an all-American V8.

That is to say, big, unpretentious and about as subtle as a smoky burnout. 

The MINI Electric visit to Nevada was produced before the outbreak of COVID-19. MINI and all involved parties are aware of their social responsibility and advise against making such a road trip at this time out of consideration for the health and well-being of all.

Glitz and glamour, gambling and gigantic shows – everything is larger than life in the entertainment metropolis of Las Vegas. And that is precisely why the MINI Cooper SE cuts a particularly striking appearance in the desert city. The small car only needs a modest footprint to park, it buzzes quietly along the world-famous Las Vegas Strip and in the permanently neon-soaked hotel and casino landscape it only needs precisely the amount of electricity that is necessary for the driving fun that is so typical of the marque.  

Munich/Las Vegas. This is a city with a magic glow where replicas of the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Egyptian pyramids and Venetian canals form backdrops for spectacular hotel and casino buildings. Elvis doubles welcome you on every street corner, and Las Vegas itself can easily take on an otherworldly aspect owing to its location in the middle of the Nevada Desert. The fact is that the imitations of famous sights on Las Vegas Boulevard – familiar to everybody simply as the “Strip” – attract more tourists every year than each of the originals. And there have always been illusionists in the show arenas like David Copperfield, Penn & Teller or Hans Klok, who hold a magic attraction for public audiences.

In the casino and entertainment metropolis, everything is larger than life and more spectacular than anywhere else. This also applies in the street. Where super-long stretch limousines, exclusive sports cars and pick-ups with muscular engines meld into everyday experiences, only a truly awesome automobile is capable of generating the wow factor. For example, an all-electric small car from the United Kingdom. And it’s a fact: In Las Vegas, the new MINI Cooper SE (combined fuel consumption: 0.0 l/100 km; combined electricity consumption: 16.8 – 14.8 kWh/100 km; combined CO₂ emissions: 0 g/km) is a truly exotic machine with high emotional appeal.

Anybody buzzing down the “Strip” in the MINI Electric while generating zero local emissions turns heads in astonishment and gets lots of thumbs-ups. The city’s most famous boulevard is almost seven kilometres long and charts its course from north to south. Lines of hotels with sonorous names like “Venetian”, “Mirage”, “Flamingo”, “Caesars Palace”, “Bellagio”, “MGM Grand”, “New York, New York” or “Luxor” lead the way to the equally famous welcome sign with the immortal words “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” to offer yet another photo opportunity. When cruising down the “Strip”, the fabulous MINI Cooper SE amazes passers-by with snappy but almost soundless bursts of acceleration. The journey from one traffic light to the next represents an ideal opportunity to make use of the two-stage brake energy recovery. Depending on the volume of traffic, each of the two toggle settings has its own distinctive appeal. If you toggle to strong recuperation, the MINI Electric is aggressively decelerated as soon as the driver releases the accelerator pedal. This mode channels a particularly large amount of energy back into the high-voltage battery. In the other mode, the car rolls to a stop at a leisurely pace and with reduced braking action.

Dark mode

When night falls in Las Vegas, the facades, advertising hoardings, direction signs and floodlights form a multicoloured, flashing and dazzling ocean of neon tubes and LED modules. However, the city council of Las Vegas is doing all it can to reduce the consumption of resources. All public buildings now generate their electricity from renewable sources. And charging stations for electric vehicles are easy to find. The MINI Electric recharges its batteries so as to be ready for the outing on the coming day.

“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”, is a famous saying among visitors that promises discretion. But in the era of social-media livestream, it’s pretty much impossible to stop the occasional embarrassing fact being leaked to the outside world. More and more tourists are also keen to explore the attractions in the environs of the city.

Staying cool in the desert

Just 30 kilometres away from the “Strip”, Red Rock Canyon at sunrise presents a wonderful play of colours on the shimmering rock formations clothed in a red glow.

Soon afterwards it gets really hot. If there happened to be some shadow somewhere on the desert roads, the thermometer would be indicating around 50 degrees Celsius there. Under the burning sun, the temperature is even higher. Any mobile phone battery will soon run out of juice when subjected to these conditions. By contrast, the high-voltage battery of the new MINI Cooper SE remains “cool”.

The range is between 235 and 270 kilometres with a fully-charged battery, and it only comes down very gradually. This is made possible by an extremely effective all-in cooling system for the interior and the high-voltage battery. Thanks to highly efficient heat-pump technology, the cooling system runs like a dream into the bargain. It also permits pre-conditioning of the interior.

After hiking at Red Rock Canyon, the driver of the MINI Electric is in for a truly enviable treat because a refreshingly pre-cooled car awaits the driver’s return. The remote app for MINI Connected even allows the pre-conditioning to be activated remotely – provided the all-important smartphone has not lost its charge in the heat.

Another popular excursion takes visitors to the Hoover Dam located around 50 kilometres to the south-east of Las Vegas. The Mike O’Callaghan – Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge takes Highway 93 across the Colorado River and the canyon it has carved out of the rocks, providing a fascinating view of the monumental dam across the valley.

It blocks the river to Lake Mead and supplies Las Vegas with drinking water. 17 turbines also harness the power of the water to generate electricity. Powerful electromagnetic waves occur near the dam as a side effect of the zero-emission energy generation.

These waves encourage the development engineers of the BMW Group to divert to the Hoover Dam on their test drives through Death Valley with prototypes of new models, in order to put the ruggedness of the electronic vehicle systems through its paces. Tests like this have significantly improved the electromagnetic shielding over recent decades. As a consequence, the onboard electronics of the MINI Cooper SE remain distinctly unimpressed during the trip over the dam, while the occupants are once again unable to take their eyes off this man-made spectacle.

MIAMI, USA – It’s interesting to note that the biggest achievements of the new Electric MINI Cooper SE, car, are rather… prosaic. After all, is the brand’s first full production electric car on sale.

Built on the same production line as other conventionally-powered MINIs in Oxford. The whole point of this car is to create an authentic MINI experience in the world of Electric Vehicles (EVs).

Electric challenges

While this might be hugely significant to the automotive industry, it’s no big deal to the average consumer.

What they probably want to know is whether they’ll have to make any compromises towards practicality. This is something that project lead Elena Eder said was of paramount importance to potential customers. 

Here’s how challenging it really is to build and Electric MINI. Ten years ago, the battery pack of the experimental MINI E was so big, it couldn’t have rear seats. However, battery density has improved since then, and modern mechanical underpinnings make use of space more efficiently.

Oh, and Joe Public is also rather concerned about things like how much things cost. They certainly don’t take too well to an electric car priced well above their conventional counterparts. 

The solution

So then, welcome to Modernity. THIS MINI Electric has absolutely no compromises to interior space. Except maybe marginally less headroom in the back) and its 211-litre boot is exactly the same. Mini achieved this by stuffing the battery pack in the T-shaped compartment beneath the rear seats and centre tunnel. 

As for how much the MINI Electric will cost once it lands in Singapore? We’re not entirely sure yet. However, if European pricing is any indicator, it should be priced around the MINI Cooper S, which is at roughly $150,000 with COE.

Both cars even have comparable power outputs: 185hp and 192hp for the MINI Electric and MINI Electric Cooper S respectively. While the Cooper S is available with a multitude of body styles, the Electric is three-doors only.

What you’ll be getting for your money, essentially, is a Cooper S that runs on batteries. This explains why MINI also refers to this car as the Cooper SE – the ‘E’ for Electric. 

How it drives

For die-hard fans of the brand, there will be some pockets of resistance. Key to acceptance of this car is to make the transition to electric as painless as possible. 

This is in stark contrast to the car that the Mini Electric shares its electric powertrain with: the BMW i3. That car was unapologetically, joyously different. It differed so much in philosophy and personality from everything else in the BMW range, it might as well have come from a different manufacturer… or planet. 

To that end, mission accomplished. The MINI Cooper SE, is quite possibly the most advanced, forward-thinking car the brand has made. From a technical, manufacturing and philosophical perspective — it’s virtually identical to everything else it already has. 

Well, almost. There’s that new digital instrument cluster, with a host of electric-specific information; the battery’s state of charge and remaining range. The graphics are cheery, funky. We’d be surprised if this visual treatment doesn’t make its way onto other MINIs before too long. 

The rest of the car will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever been in a MINI as well. The SE starts via a vaguely neon yellow key-shaped toggle in the middle of the centre stack. The gear lever is slightly over-large and blocky. There’s no manual override, however, for obvious reasons. 

For better or worse, that’s where the similarities end.

Electric dream

The Mini Electric is ridiculously quiet, as you’d expect it to be. You don’t realise how much noise and vibration a combustion-engined car generates until you get behind the wheel of an electric car. 

And another thing we’ve said time and again is how great electric vehicles are as city cars. The blissful silence provides a great calming effect to the inherently infuriating nature of city driving. Plus, the instantly available and rather beefy 270Nm is a great companion for exploiting gaps in traffic.

And boy, did we get more than we bargained for in Miami. 

Almost the entirety of our hour-and-a-half drive from central Miami to Fort Lauderdale was spent crawling in stop-and-go traffic. The multiple lane closures owing to road works and a fender-bender thrown in for good measure certainly didn’t help. 

In other words, terrible conditions for testing a car’s handling. Well, there was that one highway on-ramp, and from what we can tell, the Electric might actually handle better than some other MINI models.

True enough, MINI Cooper SE does weigh 145kg more than the Cooper S, and you do feel the pounds. However, the extra heft and improved weight distribution (almost 50:50) does dampen the Mini’s sometimes twitchy nature. 

Full-sized v Fun-sized

As for the Cooper SE’s suitability for city commutes, MINI claims a range of 235km, which means a number closer to 200km in the real world. A paltry number, given how some electric cars will do around 400km.

But those are full-sized things while the Mini Electric is a fun-sized thing. 

No doubt this will be a deal-breaker to some, but consider the Cooper SE’s — and any other MINI, for that matter — primary use case as is an urbane, urban runabout. 

In many ways, the Mini Electric is the most faithful modern interpretation of the original Mini of the 1960s. It’s more a product of necessity, a response to changing regulations, cleverly packaged and engineered, and crucially, only as good as it needs to be. 

But the most important way the Mini Electric resembles its ancient forebear is in its charm. It has a certain something about it, something about its zippy, cheerful nature that makes it quite special indeed. 

Need to know

MINI Cooper SE

Engine: Electric motor, 93.2Ah Lithium-ion battery cell

Max system power: 135kW (184hp)

Max system torque: 270Nm @100-1,000rpm

Weight: 1,440kg

0-100km/h:7.3 seconds

Top speed: 150km/h