There is no denying that nature is great and vast and utterly uninterested in the goings-on of the human race. It has the ability to build and rebuild, to create mountain, valley, canyon, to forge new species and to destroy centuries of its own work with wildfires, floods, or cracks of lightning. With a force so strong and overpowering, it is no wonder that those car enthusiasts who dare brave the great wilderness past the pavement will chose to do so in a car to rival the occasion – tall, wide, towering mammoths of steel and power. Some are elegant in their off-road comforts, some beastly, in the stature and bulk of rectangular bodies and hulking, behemoth tires. Forge the elements in a car designed to be as grand and impenetrable as nature itself. But, perhaps bigger isn’t always better.
Last April the brilliant minds at BMW gave their interns a chance to design a new kind of car, offering young enthusiasts a heralded opportunity to expand their horizons and prove their worth. And worth they proved, designing a car that would take their most adorable of lines in a direction it had never before been – off-road.
Why couldn’t a MINI Cooper, the ideal city car, suburban car, and bank heist car, not prove itself on the forest floor as well? If cyclists and traffic circles didn’t stop it, why should a lake? So they took the MINI Cooper S Paceman, chopped off the rear seats for cargo space, equipped it with the Paceman’s turbocharged option, modified the suspension, and called it the MINI Paceman Adventure, giving it a feel similar to a young kid at his first day of summer camp, hoisting up his backpack and wading in the lake for frogs.
Because, while the MINI line has managed some amazing feats through cinema history, and has proven a stalwart companion to the small city driver, and a staple of the country it isn’t actually from, it’s never gotten a chance to test its chops off-road, and, looking at the MINI Cooper Paceman Adventure, you have to wonder why. Why not take a smaller, lighter, swifter car off-road? Why must we insist on barelling through the impressive elements of nature, when, perhaps, riding the curves of this organically made road with respect to the surface beneath might prove a better trip?
The MINI Cooper Adventure may not be able to scale mountains, or even go mudding with the best of them. But with knobbier-than-city tires, and an admirable attempt at ground clearance, it should at least be given the opportunity to show its stuff. While one can argue that there are certainly small off-road vehicles, the Adventure leaves the viewer with a sense of treading lightly through the forest, versus the traditional clearing of tree and shrub by bumper and bonnet.
It certainly appears more nimble than its predecessors, offering the feeling of gentleness, even when the luxury Land Rover has remained a true companion of the rough and tumble off-road pack. It almost begs the question – why not a fleet of spritely, micro off-road cars, ones that bend into the curves, and leave softer tire prints in their wake?
None of this is to say that Jeeps, Land Rovers, FJ Cruisers, and the like don’t have a place firmly secured in the off-roader’s handbook. Certainly, some lakes are better forged in a car that clears the water’s surface than those that barely stand taller than a kitchen table. But perhaps this is a situation where we can all thrive together in peace, after all, must we deduct from the roster of amazing off-road cars before we add to it?
Still, the lovers of rock crawlers and 4Runners alike have little to fear. Designed as an exercise response by the innovative interns at BMW, the Paceman Adventure was never intended for production. As of right now, there will be no small off-road machine, no delicately dangerous explorer to chart the territories that larger beasts have failed to tread – and, though the cars may be small, that’s a big disappointment.
Images Selected From MINI USA NEWS