23 November 2023
Five-door hatchback will be based on new Mini Cooper
Mini’s reborn VW Golf rival will return as part of “simple” line-up
Mini’s upcoming Cooper five-door has been spied testing in Germany ahead of its launch in 2024.
These latest pictures of the combustion-engined car show a heavily disguised five-door Cooper, but the design changes over the previous model are simple to see. Highlights include a new front bumper and grill, as well as rear lights.
It looks much like the new electric version of the three-door hatch, now renamed the Mini Cooper, but with a thick B-pillar and traditional door handles rather than the flush ones found on the smaller car.
The future of the Mini five-door
The British brand has just begun a major overhaul of its line-up as it begins to move towards becoming an electric brand. It has just launched a new electric version of the three-door hatch, which will be joined by an identical combustion-engined version.
Mini has previously not confirmed plans to replace the five-door hatch, suggesting that the forthcoming new Mini Aceman compact electric SUV would fill its place in the line-up between the Cooper and the larger new Mini Countryman SUV.
When asked about a potential future expansion to the Mini line-up at the Munich motor show, Wurst said: “We have so much to do with the roll-out of the family we’ve just announced. The Aceman is still missing, the John Cooper Works variations are all to come, we only speak about the three-door but we actually have a five-door coming, and we have a convertible as well.”
The EV and combustion versions of the new Cooper sit on separate platforms dedicated to each powertrain, and those are likely to also be employed for the new five-door. That would allow for go-faster John Cooper Works variants too, with the hot JCW versions of the three-door hatch confirmed to arrive in 2025.
Wurst added that the Mini range wouldn’t dramatically expand in the future – describing plans for a production version of the Mini Urbanaut MPV (below) shown at the 2021 Munich show as “in the freezer”.
She added: “It’s now not the time to talk about new models, but it will come with time. It’s a question of architecture as well, and we have to work in a cost-effective way.
“Mini has to be simple. A Mini range cannot be complicated to understand. Maybe that’s why Paceman was not a successful offer.
“A Mini model has to have a clear use case, a clear size and the variants have to be limited. If we wanted to do a bigger Mini, it would not be a bigger Countryman but a different body type. It’s always about simplicity and making it easy to understand.
“Simplicity and making [the range] easy to understand is one of the prerequisites of Mini, and it should stay like this. We don’t want to become a second BMW.”