Mini Cooper (S)?
This past Saturday I drove to Greenville to see if Comp USA had any iPhone accessories (I’m trying to get an adapter to let me plug my cassette adapter in so I can use the iPhone’s iPod functionality in the car) and after discovering they didn’t have them, left and headed to the Mini dealership.
A little back story first. I started thinking about cars again and decided to look at the Mini website (miniusa.com). I was pleasantly surprised to see that the MPG of the 2nd generation Coopers has been improved to 32/40 (Cooper, manual) and 29/36 (Cooper S, manual). Now, these aren’t quite as good what my Beetle gets, but in reality a Cooper would probably average just a little less than that. I got hooked and started building one virtually and decided I would have to check them out.
So back to Saturday. I waited a long time to get some help – they only had three sales people working, but finally I was behind the wheel of a Laser Blue Cooper S. It was fantastic, of course! With nearly double the horsepower, it was a little bit of a challenge to handle, but I’m sure I could get used to it! At this point, I’m pretty much sold on the car, but I need to figure out if I really want the Cooper or the Cooper S. The SÂ would about $3,000 more which would almost definitely give me payments that are larger than I would really like to have, at least if I financed it traditionally. They do offer something called the Mini Select (lease) plan where you have smaller payments for a set period of time, but have the ability to finance the balloon payment or pay it off out-right. There are no mileage or modification restrictions, either, and payments could be as much as $200 less per month. And that’s a huge difference! The other unknowns at this point are the color to get (a very hard decision) and what will happen to the Beetle. In any case, I’m planning on driving both the Cooper and Cooper S this weekend to make my mind up on the model, and then go from there.
For the handful (I’m optimistic!) of you that read this seldom updated blog, what would be your color choice?
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