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The manual transmission in the Mini Cooper is officially dead

We feared this might be the case after learning all about the latest Mini Cooper, but now it’s confirmed: The manual Mini is dead. Confirmation of the news comes from Mini boss Stefanie Wurst via an interview with Top Gear. “We wonÂ’t have a manual, unfortunately,” Wurst told TG in reference to the new generation of Cooper. Mini revealed its new model last week in the lead-up to the Munich Motor Show, and while the company was happy to share all the details on the electric E and SE, the gas models remained shrouded in a bit of mystery. We know there will be a base and an S model powered by gasoline engines, and now we know that they will be exclusively equipped with automatic transmissions. The elimination of the manual transmission is a tad ironic, given Mini just recently opened a Mini Manual Driving School in California. The point of that school was to teach people how to operate a manual transmission, but now Mini wonÂ’t have any in its lineup come 2025. This news was also foreshadowed a bit by the introduction of the Mini John Cooper Works 1 to 6 Edition earlier this year. Mini made that model as an ode to the manual, and it limited production to just 999 units worldwide. It looks like that special edition is more of a send-off to the manual transmission than anything at this point. As of now, you can still get the manual transmission on the Mini Hardtop and Convertible models, but the 2024 model year will be the end of this generation of Mini, and with it, the end of the manual transmission in the lineup. Related video: This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. Green MINI Hatchback Electric

2014 Mini Cooper Clubvan

A Premium Van For The Modern-Day Milkman
We first saw the Mini Clubvan at the Geneva Motor Show in March 2012, then in December again at the Los Angeles Auto Show. Based on a stock Mini Clubman, the Clubvan's dimensions are identical, while all side windows aft of the middle pillar are blocked out from the inside with handy polycarbonate liners (read: fancy plastic) and have body color skin on the outside, while the rear windows are tinted to boot. It looks like a van and works like a van, so it must be a van. A Mini-van, though.
Where is Mini going with this relatively low-cost (to the company) product line extension? The chief market for this nimble little hauler is cities in Great Britain where they were frequently in bygone days identified as milk delivery vans. These days, though, there are - even in the US now - lower cost smaller urban delivery vans from Ford, Ram and Nissan. Therefore, the spin is that the Mini Clubvan is designed to cater to smaller boutique firms in need of making a fashionable impression while delivering the goods to people living in penthouses and such. Think: Florists, caterers, and so on.

Automotive April Fools' joke roundup [w/videos]

Happy April, everyone. And we all know what this first day of the month means: April Fools' Day. Today is a national holiday for pranksters with the Internet acting as a serious enabler, and it's always fun to see what kind of vivid imaginations exist out there in the automotive world. The abundance of fake news gets a little old as the day rolls on, but we did manage to get in a few chuckles thanks to a handful of major automakers and automotive news outlets that got into the pranking spirit this year
Some of our favorites this year includes Subaru showing what happens when you combine a bunch of rumors, a Corvette some may have already thought was a joke or Honda providing some in-car innovation circa the late 1980s. Honestly, we're still waiting for official confirmation from Mitsubishi that the recently introduced 2014 Mirage is an elaborate April Fools' joke using a failed design intended for the 1995 Geo Metro. We dug up as much "official" OEM foolishness we could find, as well as some of our other favorites, and posted them all below.