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A Designer Buying a Car, Part 3: Mini Clubman, Aesthetics and Practical Considerations

By Rain Noe - June 19, 2018

in Cars

An architect choosing a house to buy, a fashion designer shopping for a shirt, an industrial designer buying a car: We are extra picky within these categories because we've spent time studying them, and we know how the sausage is made.

It's important to me, when selecting a car, that the design makes sense. I don't care what it looks like to others, or what image it projects; I mean that when I look at the exterior, the lines cannot be jarring or scream CAD. The interior design has to be clean, with the controls laid out sensibly and ergonomically.

My hunt for an AWD stickshift station wagon has resulted in just three viable choices: The Mini Clubman, the Subaru Forester and the Volkswagen Golf Alltrack. I'll go over each in order.

Mini Clubman

I narrowed my Mini choices down to their Clubman over their similar Countryman because the former has marginally more cargo space.

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The exterior design of the Clubman looks "honest." By that I mean it looks as if it was designed by sculpting clay, rather than by some CAD monkey arbitrarily pulling splines around their screen.

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It also looks great in silver, my favorite color for a car.

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I like the clamshell rear doors and would be curious to see how they differ from a conventional hatch during long-term usage.

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Moving on to the interior, I like what the designers have done with the speedometer and tach:

Image by Car and Driver

However, this shot swiftly knocked this car off of the list for me:

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What the hell is that in the center of the dashboard, a time machine?

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Having a large centered circle makes no sense. It visually competes with the steering wheel. And for a circle to contain a roughly rectangular screen makes even less sense.

Image by Car and Driver

The Start/Stop switch looks like it would be fun to press…

Image by Car and Driver

…but the overall shininess of the center console, and the bright colors, say "manufactured fun!" to me.

Image by Car and Driver

Overall the interior is too garish for me, so this one's a pass.

In reality a lot more went into this decision--chief among them, my brother recently bought a Mini and the reliability has been terrible--but I wanted to offer my take on these cars' designs (and at the end, solicit yours).

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Up Next: The Forester.

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N S

6 years ago

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This is the reason for the circle in the middle of the dash. They may have made a mess of it but it wasn't arbitrary.

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marc b

6 years ago

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Thank you for finally calling the Mini out on its shockingly ill-considered interior. When my now-wife bought a manual Cooper S a few years ago I was thrilled- I love the idea of a small, fun, efficient car. But it didn't take long to find myself insulted by the interior designers' disregard for function. A few points in no particular order:
* Bottles or tall cups in cup holders restrict access to the window switches.
* Parallax in the center display meant that buttons never lined up with their menu options from a driver or passenger's perspective
* Interior door pulls require uncomfortable external rotation of the wrist (hello, CAD-induced carpal tunnel!)
* Any error/warning (ice warning, low tire, etc) would clear speed from steering column display leaving driver repeatedly clearing notifications on short drives searching for critical information on the awful center display. See also parallax.
I'm sure that there's more, but those came to mind.

Hers was a hadchback, but speaking from experience with my own Mercedes Sprinter, the barn doors significantly impact rearward visibility too. OK in a 10' tall work vehicle where a hatch would be impossible, less so in something less than half the height.

Ultimately expensive repairs led to its replacement with a '17 Golf which feels a lot more honestly laid out and intuitive. Fingers crossed on reliability but at least I don't curse it every time that I hop in.

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Juan Cano

6 years ago

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From your photos, I personally don't like the combination of old style aesthetics with the speedometer/tachometer arrangement and the flip up buttons with that screen thing you showed. They didn't commit to one look.

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