As I wile away the time, waiting for my 06 MCS to get put on a boat,

I think I read on one of my web rambling sessions looking at MINI stuff ....

That BMW MINI has made approx. 800,000 MINI's between 2002 and 2006 - and only about 25,000 a year come into the USA?

So is it correct that there are only approx 125,000 MINI's in the US. ( and any idea where the other 675,000 are distributed around the world..? )

and I believe the split is about 50/50 between the MC and the MCS.

I'm in the Portland OR area. I'm always unconsciously looking for MINI's while driving around. I wondered why I see so FEW MINI's out and about, but 125,000 cars total - nationwide - is NOT a lot of cars....
I believe the article referenced something like 25k is like 1/2 of one month production on the Camry ...

Just curious....

 

http://www.gbmini.net/sales.shtml 167K MINIs sold in US to date.

 

So somewhere on the order of 12 to 16 times more MINIs than Minis in the U.S. now

 

wow chows4us, what a bullseye chart of data!

Note the 25% drop in 2006, versus 2005. I wonder if this is because of the 2007's, or is/was there a shorter selling cycle for the 2006

I also had no idea only about 15% of MINI's are convertibles...

M

 

Short production year. I think motoringfile.com has some info on that. August was a changeover month

Since no 07s until January? I would expect 07 to be a short year too.

 

The downturn in '06 is because of the factory construction/conversion and retooling for the R56 production.

http://motoringfile.com/2006/10/11/w...-availability/
http://motoringfile.com/2006/07/31/m...-construction/
http://motoringfile.com/2006/01/19/2...-mini-in-2006/
http://motoringfile.com/2006/01/23/2...d-of-schedule/

 

So if my MCS is built in June but not paid for til August, which month is it in?

 

25k minis were expected to sell in the year 06, however my dealer told me 40k was sold. besides the case, we should wave at one another since there are so few of us. keep it allied!

 

Kinda nice that there aren't that many on the road, right? I mean, I don't want it to be the next *gag* pt cruiser.

 

It is curious that 06' would be a small production since it is a rare year that they wait until 07 for the 07 line. I would think with the extra months for 06 that there would be more, re-tooling and all. I ordered mine at the end of September when almost every other car out there would already be in the 07 models.

 

and to ma78:

re: not another PT Cruiser.

Nothing against PT Cruisers, or Camry's or Accords, or any other car that's out there in spades -
but yes, it will be cool to be in a reasonably small subset of car owners - who have purchased a car with so much emphasis on fun - and performance.

It's not why I've ordered a MINI, - I didn't realize there were as few as there are in the US.
M

 

I was reading through MC2 magazine a few weeks ago, and there was an article about the 150,000th MINI sold in the US. It was just a few months ago in Albuquerque. So Chows4us' 167k figure sounds just right.

 

Yeah, I was caught in the middle of that downtime in August... Production started July 25th, then was put on hold for two weeks before starting up again... I think it affected '06 sales mostly because they could not build as many and it's going to affect production now since '07s are starting now...