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2005 MINI Cooper Review
Big fun.
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Experience has shown that no product can succeed in our marketplace without size on its side. The extra value meal, the 13-song music CD (one great single, 12 tracks of filler), and Costco's very business model all thrive on the more-for-your-money model. Nevermind that the "more" is often something that's bad for you, that you don't want, or is more than you can use (respectively), because as long as our cash is paying for something, we sign the check.
So along comes a car company that thinks it not only ignore this rule, but challenge it head-on. That company would be BMW, who hasn't had much trouble selling cars built with its own values to the rest of the world a few billion times over. With the new incarnation of the Mini Cooper, a once-British entity now under its corporate wings, they're betting it can be done even without the cachet of the Bimmer badge backing it up. Hey, they're serious here: the Mini got a clean-sheet design with the full engineering budget, lots of real-car parts, its very own assembly plant in England, and a price tag that goes as high as 32 big ones. But with all this packaged into a punier shell than the often-mocked Kia Rio, who here could take it seriously? Next Page
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