SOME BRIGHT SPARK

Tiny, light, and brilliant, the original Mini was a flash of genius. On London’s teeming streets, can its big, heavy, and now battery-electric successor bring the same small-car magic?

- James Taylor

If you can remember the 1960s, you weren’t really there, so they say (“they” being the operative word since, appropriately enough, nobody can quite remember who came up with that line first).

But Mini cannot — will not — forget the ’60s. how can it, when the entire brand is built on (and in) the image of the original Austin Seven Mini? The Austin — and its morris mini-minor twin — were launched in 1959 and through the ’60s came to embody that decade’s penchant for style and the breaking down of class barriers. In perfect step with the explosion of pop culture, the cheeky mini is as symbolic of the ’60s as Merseybeat, Twiggy, and the moon landings.

That was then, this is now, and a time-warp 1960 Austin seven is sitting on a West Kensington street, snuggled into a parking space opposite its latest modern equivalent — from which snakes a charging cable. The Mini species is starting a new chapter, making like Dylan in ’65 and going electric. Has the Mini Electric hung on to its essential Mini-ness? Is it still more fun to drive than other everyday-usable cars, still more characterful than any mere machine has a right to be, and still engineered with a good pinch of ingenuity? No better way to find out than to drive it back-to-back with its source material on its old Swinging London stomping grounds.

Zipping through the capital’s streets to our rendezvous point with the classic mini earlier this morning, the mini electric certainly felt spirited. Like all-electric cars, an addictive snap-hit of instant torque is ever-ready to squirt you away from traffic lights and roundabouts and with 270 nm available from its BMW i3s-sourced motor, mini is marketing performance as a USP over other EV hatches.