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Sunday, 14 October 2007 |
 Oh, as if nobody saw this coming. You'd have to have been living in a barrel the last two years not to know pretty much everything about the new Mini Clubman already.
There were four concepts of the Clubman in total before this production version even debuted. There was one in Frankfurt in 2005, an unadorned design concept without any theme or trim. You saw it at Tokyo in 2005 as that godawful celebration of green-and-white tackiness with a traveling picnic tea set on the roof as the Mini Concept Tokyo, a car that made the Viceroy Hotels look downright livable. It was on the stand at Detroit in 2006 as the Mini Traveller concept, with a winter theme and a snowboard on the roof (Mini announced there that it would go into production in two years). And you saw it again when it rolled into Geneva dressed as a rally support vehicle. A few months later, Mini officially slapped the Clubman name on it, and for the last year or so, you've seen crystal-clear spy photos and video enough that this article you're reading is darn near redundant.
But we'll write it anyway.
The new Mini Clubman came straight out of the Munich design department, if you listen to the designer. It was not a product-planning decision, not an executive decision, it was all design, baby.
"It was design by dictatorship," clarified the somewhat autocratic Mini chief designer, Gerd Hildebrand. "All else, this marketing, these focus groups, what have you, is bulls***."
So, if you don't like the Clubman, tell Hildebrand.
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