I can’t say I love the grille though. The older one seems to look more “friendlier”

Well, I won’t say anything definite until I see it in person.

Overall not much of a change, which is a good thing :)

Nobody has mentioned that the spy shots are no where close to the concept car shown in Frankfurt or Detroit. The concept was hideous! This is pretty good.

I like the grille.

I will always like Mk1 better….Time will tell whether this is a better look to the soon to be MINI community

With the new 911 (997), Porsche did the same thing, trying to copy the design of the oh so marvellous looking 993… Close but no cigar…

Then there’s the indicators in the headlights, which is a shame, but seems to be pretty consistent across all rumours, so probably have to live with it. Just happy to see a hint of a normal side repeater in the A-panel instead of the wing mirror mounted ones that were rumoured, fingers crossed they are keeping those and it is not just a camouflage trick.

Commenting on whoever said they don’t like the front overhang: the only pictures where you can actually make out the front overhang is on the pictures of the traveller, and I think it is already commonly agreed there is a serious amount of cladding on the front of the photographed traveller (just have a look at the headlights, you can clearly see they are perspex, with the real headlights mounted behind them a good inch or two).

I have a pic of almost the same angle of the front of my MINI, the headlight is still is an oval. No way an oval somehow turns into a circle no mater what the angle of the viewing or what astral plane you reside on. So if your 3D program is doing that you need to get it fixed. A small clue for you would be the chrome treatment, hell my 2 year old grandson can do better chrome on his Etch-A-Sketch.



JK

The front grille looks…incomplete.

I love when redesigns of something I own leave me blasé. The last thing I need right now is an irresistible desire to get a newer car. Gotta make it 20 years with my ‘05 MCSc. That’s what I promised the wife. :)

I wouldn’t mind the additional power though…

Euler angles–you mean you’re not using quaternions? :-)

The headlights look fine to me, too.

Wrong about what, exactly? The headlights? I’m a mechanical engineer and I work with 3-D engineering design and stress analysis applications all day…I’m continually rotating things in 3D. Unless your wife calculates Euler angle transformations on a daily basis, I’m sticking to my guns on the headlights. :)

I’m not saying that the photos are entirely unaltered…just that Gabe’s explanation for the headlights in particular makes a great deal of sense from an engineering perspective.

So…if the R56 is released and has headlights as described by Gabe you’ll buy me a beer? Sounds good!

JK

Also, these photos are credited to Hans Lehmann. Lehmann is a god among spy-shot photographers…he’s the best and most professional there is. If these really are Lehmann photos, they haven’t been altered nearly as much as people here seem to think. I concede that the rear 3/4 shot looks like it’s had some attention paid to the rear light cluster. Perhaps these aren’t Lehmann photos at all…who knows?

Keep in mind that once you convince yourself that you’re looking at an altered photo, you can see all sorts of artifacts, whether they’re real or not.

JK

Hate to have to correct you but the stock Cooper tires are 175/65 R15, 0.4 inch narrower than 185 mm.

The spy-shots keep looking better. I agree that they should have also released the un-retouched versions of the pics. We are also still looking at test mules so it’s difficult to separate fact from obfuscation.

Are some of you blind or just in a hurry when viewing these shots? How do you miss the fact that there are multi cars shown?!