It is a grim and often recounted truth about buying new cars that the value of your investment dips abruptly the minute you pull off the forecourt, and even as the salesman is waving and smiling in your rear-view mirror. People are apt to note that it's like buying an antique vase at auction and then knocking the handle off on your way out of the door.
So it's heartening to hear about the tables being turned in the case of the hugely desirable new Mini. People want this car very badly indeed. So badly that they are prepared to root out the details of people who have bought a new Mini but are still waiting for it to arrive (there's a two-month queue) and then offer them anything up to £3,000 to take the as yet undelivered car off their hands. That's more than a quarter of what the car costs. For the moment, Mini owners are splendidly up on the deal.
Meanwhile, people with slightly less initiative are going in to dealerships and pleading to be sold the demonstrators. And people like me, with a demonstrator Mini Cooper on loan for a week, are pulling into a dealership and asking the nice man there if he can fix the passenger seat, which has gone into fully reclined mode and won't come out again - not an entirely regrettable problem for the passenger, who can lie back and enjoy the view through the sunroof; but not something to relish for the person in the back, who has been obliged to drive the last few miles with a mouth full of headrest.
As it turned out, the seat needed replacing. Apparently there has been a little problem with the mechanism on the pre-sales models, but I was assured that it has been solved on the production models (the ones people are currently over-bidding for). In the short term, I was faced with a simple choice: abandon the passenger or abandon the car. I decided to abandon the passenger. You don't easily agree to leave behind a car like the new Mini.
For one thing, you'd miss the attention. Or maybe not. But no car I have driven has caused people to stop and stare like BMW's Mini. If you want to get some sense of what it might feel like to be Madonna, get behind the wheel of a Mini over the next month or so, before they start to feature more numerously on the streets.
Overtakers slow down. Foot passengers call after it. People notice it from yards away and start pointing. If it had been banana yellow with a large papier-mache model of Kenneth Clarke's head on the roof, this would have been understandable. But it wasn't. It was the cool and reticent silver and black one and had no decoration other than its badge.
Still more extraordinarily, the attention is 100% good-natured - which is, in my experience, not always guaranteed to drivers of unusual motors. Nobody seemed to be saying: "Give us a break, you flash git." Rather they seemed to be saying: "Congratulations on your ownership of a competitively priced and highly stylish town runabout, whose roots are in the blissful, happy-go-lucky heyday of popular British motoring, even if the car is actually built by a German company these days."
It is bigger than the old ones, especially in the bonnet area, and it has a hatchback where the old ones had a trunk, but it is still unmistakably a Mini, with children's book headlights and clocks the size of plates. Like the revamped Beetle, it works that neat trick of looking both deeply retro and sharply contemporary at the same time.
How many people can you get in a Mini? The record currently stands at 18, but during my own various outings in the car I stopped at four, which seemed like enough to be going on with.
Admittedly, two of them were blessed with the smallness which being under five brings. Fully grown adults can scramble into the back and make themselves comfortable after a fashion, but they should probably seek a qualified osteopath's advice if this is something they intend to do more than, say, four or five times a month.
The driver, on the other hand, gets to luxuriate in his or her own little comfort zone. By broadening the cabin, BMW has done away with many of the traditional indignities associated with driving a Mini, including cracking your right elbow on the door during any turning manoeuvre, barking your left shin on the gear-stick while getting the car into reverse and chipping both your collarbones on the steering wheel whenever you try to change the radio.
Of course, purists will argue that these discomforts were an integral part of the Mini-driving experience and that calmly operating a dash-mounted electric window switch without duress in an ergonomically sound environment is so wide of the car's essential spirit that one might as well be driving a Vauxhall Astra.
Fair point, I guess, though it may be some small consolation to this constituency that it at least remains possible, even in the expanded BMW Mini, to graze your scalp on the leading edge of the fold-down sun visor. Truly the car has something for everyone.
