When you are spending Rs 35 lakhs on a car, what do you really care aboutIJ Getting noticed or being comfortableIJ
To make the question asked above a bit simpler to deal with, we will take two cars that are made by the same manufacturer. Well, sort of. BMW owns Mini, and the Mini Cooper D is one of their main offerings in India. BMW also recently launched the second-generation of their X1 earlier this year. One is a small hatchback and one is a smallish Sports Utility Vehicle. They have almost nothing in common, other than the fact that the profits made from them eventually go to the same bank account.
So why are we comparing them you might rationally askIJ Well, you see both cars, at a decent level of trim cost around Rs 35 lakh ex-showroom. I mean if you equip the Mini with the Union Jack on the roof or Union Jack leather stitching on the head-rests or buy the ‘M Sport’ trim on the X1 they can both become quite expensive but well, both cars cost a shade under 40 lakhs on the road (with a decent amount of features), four million rupees for those of you using the metric numbering system nowadays. In the past month I have driven both cars fairly extensively in the city and really enjoyed driving them and I can safely say without any doubt that they are also completely different to drive. Comparing them is stupid, but they cost the same. And therein lies the rub.
When you are buying a car for a decent sum of money, you should lay out all the options on the table. So at 35 lakhs you should consider the Audi A3 and Q3; Mercedes ClA and GlA and these two cars. Personally, the X1 feels far superior to its SUV rivals from Audi and Mercedes. At least it feels more modern. The A3 and ClA are obviously bigger than the Mini. So logically, one would argue that the BMW X1 is the car to buy when you are looking for a SUV and, well, personally I would stick around for the refreshed Audi A3 coming to Indian roads in a couple of months if I was looking for a nice German sedan. Or a Skoda Octavia if brand value did not matter all that much to my soul. But what matters to my soul is passion. And attention. lots of attention. And the Mini in the sedate (yet historic) British Racing Green as the new press fleet car is painted in is not an obvious ‘stare at me’ car.
The last Mini in the Press fleet was bright red with black racing stripes, so you could not miss it. And the third-generation new Mini is over a year old now, so it isn’t all that new. But my word, does the Mini attract stares. And the right sort of stares. You see young college girls point at this car, and even guys. It gets stared at. The last time I drove something that got stared at so much in Delhi it was a Porsche 911 Targa, and well, I could stare at just the roof mechanism of that car all day.And not just outside, even when my friends who sat inside were impressed with the car. Despite its comically uncomfortable rear seats with legroom only for pre-teens, if that. Yet, you would get your pre-teen to sit in this car very easily. I mean with the changing colours of the lED lights, the lovely switchgear, the lED ring around the central panel, although I do wish they make it into a full circular lED display soon.
Make no mistakes, those of us whose jobs it is to switch cars every second day would immediately recognise this car as a BMW. The gear lever is a BMW gear lever, the backlight colours on the speedometer and even the iDrive infotainment system and fonts are very, very BMW. Heck, if you got out of an X! And sat in a Mini and didn’t notice the big ‘MINI’ on the steering wheel, you wouldn’t know that you had changed brands.
But the cars are different, even to drive. The X1 20d is a more comfortable car in all respects, firstly it is a spacious and it rides over rough roads gently. As against the Mini where even on ‘Normal’ mode it feels that the suspension is hewn from stone. Every change in road surface, you feel it. Yet, that actually comes to the Mini’s benefit when you find a nice, twisty road with a good surface, the Mini is great fun to drive. Small and compact, it just loves to be thrown around.
The Mini might not be the most practical motorcar in the world, but it is difficult to find a more fun car at this price, even though the 1.5 litre diesel under the Mini bonnet is a full 70 horsepower less powerful than the 2-litre diesel motor on the X1. Not that the X1 is not a ‘fun’ car, it is a very nice, capable car and on the open road this car can get moving and on rough roads it does smoothen out the bumps.
So willy-nilly we come back to the same point. It is useless to compare two intrinsically different cars even if they cost more or less the same. If you are young, love to be a show-off and like cool features such as the ability to change the colour of the cabin lights, well, you have the Mini Cooper D, and you can even save a little bit of money by buying the three-door version. If you are a bit more practical, and even sit at the back once in a while there is the X1. These two cars are clearly siblings, just that one became the DJ and the other one joined the financial industry.