my brother has had 7 of them,i have yet to see a mini without a pair of legs sticking out from under the bonnet :) i thought they all had some strange kind of hood ornament till it swore..lol

LOL you have a point Shazz.. Our first car was a mini too.. Despite the fact that at the end of it's "life" it spent more time at the repair shop than it did on the road, it was stuill the funnies and fastest little car I've ever had. Waaah! I MISS my mini....

My mum had 2 minis when I was a teen. The first one was orange with a black roof which we christened Garfield. Wonderful little car and the only reason we got rid of it was because it was rusted all to hell. The second one was a white mini clubman. Damned thing was possesed and tried many times to kill my mum, (no joke). The final straw came when whilst I was pregnant we had quite a serious accident in it. Took me years to stop feeling nervous about getting in a car. Although it was very satisfying watching it being crushed at the breakers yard :)

I miss mine too. Last Mini I saw on the road was about 1985, I gather in the US they are extinct as road cars, but still exist on the race track.

I see tons of minis out here in CA, not the older ones so much as the new. They're getting hugely popular in this area, can't vouch for the rest of the states though! If I didn't have a big dog to haul around I'd consider one myself. :)

I've never seen one on the road. Is that the same car Mr. Bean drove before it got flattened by the tank?

yup, it's a Mr Bean car. And to be honest, I SCREAMED when it got run over by that tank! I think he got a new one though, I'm not sure of the continuity of the Mr Bean episodes, but sometimes there's a sliding-lock-with-padlock*) on the door and sometimes not ;o) *) I'm sure that has a name in english but I don't know it..

Why do the British drink warm beer? Lucas makes refrigerators too.

The new one isn't really a Mini, just the same name. ;-)

They're all over Portland -- brand new ones. In fact, I'd never heard of them until about a year ago. I didn't realize that it was what Mr. Bean drove. Now that I think of it, they do look like his car, just without the padlock on the door, LOL. I see the little things all over the place here. There's a red and white one that parks everyday in the multi-level parking structure across the street from my office. Melanie

LOL.jim my brother and hiis friends would agree with you whole heartedly on the new mini not being a real one,he is a member of a mini club and between them they purchased a model of a new mini and one of them ran over it in an original mini,they then had a competition and the winner gets to keep the crushed model on their parcel shelf :) i personally like them both,but the original is definately more fun :D

Ewww no the new minis aren't minis at all.. they TOTALLY lack the charm and "cute" look of the Real one. The front lights are all wrong. The Real Mini had what I like to think of as a "cute face" (yes to me, cars DO have faces...) while the new one looks angry. They may be safer and less polluting (the old minis were once elected the MOST polluting car you could get here) but they're without soul. And btw, yes the mini on the pic is definately too big, but as you said, nothing a little scaling can't take care of. What's worse is that the model is mirrored... G

Never had one but always wanted one, my ex brother and law had one of those ones with the flatter bonnet and the 1100cc engine (clubman was it?) anyway that was real nice...then a buddy was going to sell me one when i passed my test but crashed it 3 days before so i ended up with a ford cortina ..yuk LOL.....The new ones are made by BMW, who make nice cars but its not the same, i had a trip to the factory where they make them and no kidding you could eat your dinner off the floor, the place is so imaculate, best bit of the whole day though, they fastened two seats to a car building robot and gave you a ride on it, beats ANY fairground ride i've been on LOL.....Steve

Oh ernyoka1 its Hasp and padlock :o)...Steve

I scaled the Mini down to 90% in the pic (it should have been 85%,, but that didn't work out for this pose), bear in mind Ingenue Vickie is very small, 5'3"... ;-

Yeah, I felt bad for Bean when his car got squashed. If you watch the Best of Bean DVD, you'll see he saved it and stored it in his attic. IIRC, it does have a face. And I thought it was a bolt lock.

Yup the new ones are crawling all over California even with all it's Smog Laws.

They are also popular out here for electric conversions. My brother's got two of them -- the first one he did gets about five miles on a full charge, but the other one is expected to do rather better.

Attached Link: http://home.comcast.net/~sielkes/

("Pinks": old reference to ownership papers, street racing lingo.)

Ha! I think on a real, real tight course a full-house (old) Mini Cooper S could beat a Ford GT-40, at least on a good day. Your new GT-40 looks great, incidently, I saw it at DAZ! Anyway, I cearly remember that the original mini was exactly 10' long (10' 1/4" if it had bumper over-riders!), that is what I used for my size calculations, using the system where 1 poser unit = 8' (there are other systems, of course).

On a Rally course the Mini would have a chance, on a Road course NO chance at all.

BTW, the GT40 won Le-mans 4 years in a row and in one year(1969) took 1st, 2nd and 3rd. Top speed over 200 mph, average at Le Mans around 130-150, including curves.

As far as scale goes, look at it this way. At 5'3" sitting up straight her head would almost touch the roof. I have a co-worker with an old mini. I'm 6'3" and I can fit reasonably well without having to duck (much), granted most of my height is legs. I was amazed at how much room is inside one of those tiny little cars.

I try to make the cars look right with a standard vicky3 in the drivers seat or standing next to it, probably not exactly the most accurate way, but seems to work well in general.

Oh, I don't even think a Mini could beat a GT-40 on a Rally course, I was thinking more of a a Sprint or Gymkana (sp). GT-40s are pretty fast! I entered Sprints (which is what they called them by then, a course laid out in a parking lot, marked by plastic cones) in my 997 Mini Cooper, it would do pretty good against Corvetts and walk all over all the Mustangs and suchlike. And a 997 Cooper couldn't even do 90 mph!

The quote was actually "Lucas, the Prince of Darkness" now that I remember... The lights were actually pretty reliable, the starters and generators were awful, I had a coil once that would make the engine misfire only on hard left hand turns (heck of a time figuring that one out). Then there was the awfull electric fuel pumps, Oh-My (which may have been made by somebody else, I forget). Then there were the awful (never-the-same-idle-speed-twice) SU carbs, Oh the memories! And to think they put SU carbs on Rolls-Royces. I also had a Lotus Elan with Weber 40 DCOEs, which really, really were the BEST CARBS EVER MADE.