The manual transmission’s transformation to an expensive luxury feature continues with the latest combustion-powered Mini Coopers. Recently facelifted to make them look more like their new EV cousins, the ICE Minis are only available with an automatic gearbox – unless you spring for the flagship John Cooper Works. Mini hasn’t officially revealed the JCW, but it has shown pictures of a lightly disguised hatch and confirmed that, unlike lesser Minis, it would give buyers the choice of sending their power to the front wheels though manual or auto transmissions.
Whether that courtesy extends to the JCW
Convertible, a car with the same basic powertrain and chassis setup, but less
likely to be picked by true enthusiasts, isn’t clear, but let’s hope it does.
There are already too few manuals available in the world.
Though this Convertible spied putting in
some hot testing laps at Germany’s Nurbrurging was still wearing plenty of
disguise, it’s easy to pick out details shared with the teased JCW hatch
prototype, including the busy grille, the square intakes at each corner of the
front bumper, and the single, center-mounted tailpipe, which looks just like
the aftermarket silencers that were popular with Mini owners in the 1960s.
Glimpses of the interior show the
slimline, circular OLED touchscreen common to all new Minis, but one mystery is
what the brand plans to do under the hood. We know it will carry over the
outgoing car’s 2.0-liter turbocharged inline four, but not how many horses it
will generate. Spy photo team seems to think the B48-code engine will make
the same 228 hp as before, but since Mini says the new JCW will “push
the boundaries of speed and agility” and has already bumped the output of the
Cooper S from 176 hp to 201 hp, we strongly suspect a JCW
power hike is on the cards. We’ll find out for sure some time in the next
couple of months.
