Test-driving the NEW MINI in Puerto Rico

When you get an email inviting you to go to Puerto Rico to attend an event, you get excited. When you get invited to Puerto Rico to test drive the all new MINI you jump out of your seat.

2014 MINI Cooper on the beach

I’ll be honest, I’m not much of a car guy, I drive a Saturn Ion, and I was a little intimidated to accept the invitation. You could say that writers that spend all of their time focusing on cars and I run on different cylinders (ridiculous car pun intended). This review may not be filled with all of the technical jargon, but I’ll give you an honest opinion of what I thought about driving the cars.

Puerto Rico seemed to be the perfect setting to drive the new sporty MINI Cooper and MINI Cooper S. As we sped around the island on winding roads through lush rain forests, past colorful Caribbean buildings and along the coastline with palm trees lining the roads it was impossible not to enjoy the test drive. Hmmm…maybe MINI marketing had something to do with picking the location. I doubt they were good enough to be able to coordinate the spectacular rainbow that happened to show up at the end of the launch press conference, but maybe they are pretty good engineers. They were able to completely redesign the 2014 MINI taking pretty much everything and making it new while staying true to the form of MINI.

The MINI’s handling was very responsive and handled well along the curvy up and down roads we were on. In a few instances it even helped us dodge a few of the islands stray dogs. The interior was clean and well designed, you could tell they put a lot of work into the console, making sure the navigation, entertainment and connectivity of the car were all taken care of and well refined. All of the flips, switches, gadgets and consoles were fun to explore. It was really easy to run the system and anyone could literally jump into the car and have their destination plugged in and their favorite tunes playing in no time.

I was really impressed by how big the car felt inside compared to its overall size. The MINI is still a compact car, but it is spacious inside. I could easily fit our three girls into it, but probably not all of the strollers, snacks and diaper bags we now require to go any place. Luggage and getting to the airports would be a snap if you didn’t need the back seat for passengers. The seats configure in multiple ways to get the optimal cargo space for any occasion.

All in all it was a really fun car to drive, good gas mileage, nice handling, fun gadgets and compact size.

You can check out all of the details on the new 2014 MINI here: miniusa.com.

Thanks to MINI to providing transportation, lodging and the opportunity to test drive the new MINI.