As long as they didn’t need to carry extremely heavy
or voluminous items, customers took to the Mini pickup better than its
popularity on the streets would have you believe – after all, the British
automaker managed to shift nearly 60 thousand units back
in the day.
Technically, this was a ‘coupe utility vehicle’,
measuring 3.4 m in length. It was built on the longer Mini Van
platform and, as you can see, it came with an open-top truck bed and a
tailgate. Its weight? Less than 680 kg with a full tank of gas.
We’ve come a long way since the days where anybody
would have considered this a practical solution of sorts. In 2019, this is more
of a collector’s car; something you keep in your garage and maybe take out from
time to time to show your friends.
The one you’re seeing here was photographed in
Frankfurt, Germany recently, with the image subsequently posted to Reddit’s
Awesome Car Mods thread – even though this isn’t a mod but a factory-spec car,
external door hinges and all.
While we don’t have images of the interior, we can
tell you that these cars were usually stripped-back in terms of amenities, as
they were designed to “appeal primarily to tradespeople”. As for what a modern Mini pickup
could look like nowadays, we don’t have to look for any renderings to get the
answer, because in 2014, the automaker came out with the Paceman Adventure
concept, based on the all-wheel driven Cooper S Paceman.
