Twenty-five years ago I played hooky from work for a few hours. It was a special day. A new brand from BMW was opening its doors across America, and it had completely captured my imagination. As a bit of an Anglophile and a rabid car enthusiast, I had to be there. If my hunch was correct, I’d be putting in an order before I left.

Driving up to the dealer, one of only two in Chicago at the time, I remember thinking about what made me a car person in the first place. Some of my earliest memories are helping my dad under the hood of his BMW 2002. That car sparked something that grew into a lifelong fascination with design, engineering, and the way a well-made object can change how you feel about the world. It seemed like ground zero for a movement. The second shockwave came on that late March day in 2002, pulling into a MINI dealership for the first time. It felt like history was ready to be written. All I had to do was go drive the car.

It took about 30 seconds to fall in love. That’s how long it took to reach the first corner. The design and packaging were completely fascinating, but it was the way the whole thing felt that got the blood moving. Keep in mind, this was a 112 horsepower Cooper. Nothing exotic on paper. But the immediacy of the steering, the way the chassis responded, the sense that the car was genuinely alive in your hands, none of that was on the spec sheet. The Cooper S raised the stakes further with its supercharger whine and sharper responses, but I would have had to wait two additional months for one. That wouldn’t do. Twenty days after walking out of that dealer with my name and deposit on an incoming car, I had an Indie Blue MINI Cooper with a historically-accurate white roof. It even had all three packages. Remember when there were just three?

The plan was to sell it later that year and order a Cooper S. The problem was that MINI-fication set in before I had the chance. The connection that developed with that car was unlike anything I had experienced with a new vehicle. It wasn’t just about the driving, though the driving was genuinely special. It was about what the car represented, a small, honest, brilliantly conceived object that seemed to have been made by people who actually cared whether you enjoyed it.

Owning it wasn’t enough to contain the fever. My passion for the car seemed to gain momentum with every drive. I started looking for others who felt the same way, for a community of people with this same MINI sickness. I found a few. There were online forums and early owner groups, but by late 2002 I realized that posting on boards and talking to friends wasn’t sufficient. I had to create something. From that impulse, in late September 2002, MotoringFile was born.

Twenty-five years on, looking back at that drive and what came from it, the perspective is complicated in the best possible way. The brand that opened those dealership doors in March 2002 and the brand that exists today share a name, a silhouette, and a set of values, but they are not the same entity. The R50 started at under $17,000. The current Cooper opens closer to $30,000, and the lineup now extends to a Countryman that in its most capable electric form costs north of $50,000. The small, accessible, almost aggressively unpretentious car I fell for in a Chicago dealer has evolved into something operating on considerably more premium terms.

A few weeks later and the modifications had already begun.

What has happened to the product itself is genuinely remarkable to witness from this distance. The current generation represents the most transformative shift in MINI’s history since 1959, with the brand’s largest product overhaul ever. The R50 had a Tritec engine built in Brazil and toggle switches that felt charming precisely because they seemed slightly improvised. The current Cooper has a turbocharged BMW-sourced engine, a circular OLED display and more processing power than imaginable in 2002. Then there’s the all-electric J01 represents the first complete rethink of the car’s architecture since the R50 itself arrived in Oxford in 2001.

The Countryman is perhaps the most telling chapter. In 2002 a MINI SUV would have seemed either visionary or absurd depending on your perspective. Today it is the brand’s volume seller globally. The small car that I loved for being defiantly small now anchors a range that extends in almost every direction the original refused to go.

And yet. The thing that hooked me in 30 seconds on that first corner in March 2002 has not entirely disappeared. The current Cooper, properly sorted, still communicates through the steering in a way that most small cars don’t bother attempting. The go-kart feeling has been shaped and refined by twenty-five years of development, by the demands of being a premium product in a competitive global segment, but it has not been abandoned. The people making these cars still know what the R50 meant. That tension between what MINI was and what it needs to be is the most interesting story in the brand’s history and the one we’ll keep covering here.

Twenty-five years, more MINIs than I can easily count, and successful media outlet, the fascination with the brand, its products, and its future is still there. That first corner is still the test. Everything else is just numbers.