I am nothing if not a fair, honest, and gracious (and beautiful, too, why not) journalist. That’s why when I review Minis, I try to do so from the deranged standpoint of someone who might actually buy them. But the truth is, I hate them for a ton of reasons. Patrick George, who is wrong, thinks I’m wrong. Welcome back to Carguments.
This is the third episode of Carguments, a new series for us in which, basically, we turn a camera at ourselves when we’re normally screaming at each other at our desks.
Patrick is the Editor-in-Chief of Jalopnik, and along with the title comes a tyrannical nature and bad opinions. First, it was the new Toyota Supra, and now, it’s Mini. Not the original Mini, mind you, which was good and wonderful, but the new ones, which are BMWs.
Although keeping this absurd website up and running is probably his worst decision, arguably his second worst is that he’s owned not one, but TWO Minis. And that’s awful, because Minis are awful. They’re huge and tacky and overpriced without any real sense of fun compared to something like a Fiat, and thus should be banished from this Earth.
Just look at this thing:
It’s so big it can’t even fit in the picture, which I haven’t definitely not modified in any way at all. Also, it has a German plate, because that’s what this car is.
But he thinks otherwise. He’s owned two of them now, and thinks they’re delightful and quirky and great handling cars. He advocates for them by saying they’re among the last truly fun and whimsical cars we have left, that all of their current models can be had with manual gearboxes, and that I am a trash human for thinking otherwise. Look how fun this is, he says:
Whatever. At least we can all agree that the originals were good.