For those of you that can actually purchase this MINI, Accelerate Bristol got some seat time in a MINI Cooper D and give us this very favourable review.
>Where the old MINI only offered a diesel engine with the entry-level One, this time round the diesel gets the full Cooper treatment. This means things are different when it comes to the amount of power customers get. Very different. Where the old One D used a Toyota-sourced 1.4-litre diesel that was good for a mere 75bhp, the latest car offers a massively punchier 110bhp unit with fully 240Nm of torque between 1,750 and 2,000rpm. Deploying the engine’s overboost function gives the Cooper D an additional 20Nm of torque, meaning the driver will experience 260Nm at 2,000rpm.
[ MINI Cooper D ] Accesleratebristol.com
64.2 mpg!!! And we cannot get this car here. It’s amazing that by way of comparison, the Mini D gets four times the mileage of many SUV…I just get a wee bit disgusted with our appetitie for rolling tanks while the globe continues to heat up. how some of the rolling stock here get LEV ratings while consuming four times the fuel – I know it’s a different fuel – is beyond my common sense wisdom.
Do you think the Big 3 and the oil cartels had any influence on BMW’s decision not to import the D?
Read the dozens of other posts about the diesel — it’s the NOx emissions, not a corporate conspiracy.
Ya-right.
As MINI says, they can’t make a business case for it. It’s just a very expensive proposition to build and emissions-certify a small Diesel engine for all 50 States regs., knowing that an engine that passes cert. this year could fail to pass in all States next year, as the emission standards are a changing/moving target. For a niche market car, not profitable. It works in Europe, ’cause they can use an existing off-the-shelf Toyota Diesel engine. Even Toyota, which sells way more vehicles in the U.S than MINI, haven’t bothered to try and build a Diesel good for the U.S. market.
Still silly. The Cooper D is made at the same factory as the Cooper. If they sold the D in the US, it would be loaded onto the same ship as the Cooper, use the same car carrier, and be sold at the same dealers. The only difference would be that dealers in NY, CA, VT, etc. wouldn’t be able to sell it. But dealers in many other states could, they would just let their customers check the “D” option on the order form. I know the states where the emissions standards are too strict are top sales states for MINI, but how much more is the cost of NOT having 50-state emissions? It’s just logistics, nothing more.
Pretzel,
Understood, it’s a different fuel. But when a vehicle getting 13mpg gets a LEV sticker there’s a problem; it’s burning almost 5 times the amount of fuel for every driven mile. I wish folks would stop and think about that for a moment, not that you haven’t. The mpg vs pollution ratio is not being played on a level field. If the mini D pollutes the same as a 13mpg SUV for every gallon burned, the 13mpg SUV pollutes nearly 5 times as much.
This point is lost on a lot folks and its no wonder when the marketers and magicians contrive the information.
Chad, I agree 110%, and wish MINI would JUST TRY IT. Mercedes does it with their D model, just selling it in the States that it is “legal” in. Like you say, (other than some Dealer service training and parts support), it would not cost MINI anything. Might even raise enough of a squawk from prospective MINI D owners in those restrictive States, to have those States rethink their convoluted and bass-ackwards emissions regs.
Michael, I do agree that it’s silly to consider the emissions of a car when it idles at the inspection station, and you don’t consider how that car, weighing less, and revving less, might put out a lower overall emissions level, and by using less fuel, produce fewer emissions in the production and transport of said fuel.
It’s important to note that someone who trades in a Dodge Ram SRT-10 for a Cooper D is a rare person indeed. It doesn’t help much if you trade in a Honda Civic for a D. Going from 12 MPG to 20 MPG is a much bigger improvement than going from 40 MPG to 60 MPG.
Me personally, would be trading in a 17 MPG car that takes 91 octane gasoline. Since I only put about 8000 mile per year, I would only save 337 gallons of fuel per year, saving me a mere $1100 per year. Compare that with a Cooper, where my savings would be $790 per year. Actually, now that I look at the numbers, $1100 per year combined with those few minutes saved every couple weeks not having to visit the gas station… Makes me want the D really bad.
Michael — I don’t disagree with what you’re saying one bit. I’m just telling our friend TO that the diesel’s NOx emissions don’t pass muster under California law (and by extension the laws of several other states), which explains, at least in part, MINI’s decision not to bring the D across the pond. In other words, it’s probably a justifiable dollars-and-cents decision, not a vast corporate conspiracy. And it’s important to remember that not all emissions are created equal, as you suggest.
it is really tempting, especially when every review is so favorable.
but we’re talking about saving money at the cost of the environment.
let’s cut china out of the equation first. what was the number they came up with recently?
for approx. $675 a year we could import with ethics, build things ourselves & promote better living.
But is it that bad for the environment? The environmental cost of getting 7 gallons of low sulfur diesel from well to the pump may be considerably less than getting 10 gallons of premium gasoline from well to pump. And if you choose to use biodiesel, your carbon emissions would be nearly neutral.
I realize that I live part of my life ideally, and perhaps naively. But I wish the monetary force behind the political decisions would for once, consider what is really at risk here…
I guess Petzel Logic, I would like all vehicles to first: put out the same pollutants per gallon of fuel burned. We obviously need to consider the differences between gas and deiesel. Then, each vehicle, based upon how many gallons it uses every mile, receives a pollution rating.
So, what do we do with hybrids and biodeisel and other forms of fuel? I don’t know. But the current system is so hard to understand and convoluted…and isn’t global warming a global challenge? I love the idea of preserving culture in our global world, but pollution ought to be very easy for eveyone to understand so that we make intelligent decisions…so that products that are actually helpful are shown to be against a competative backdrop.
Too ideal?