Gadgetory

it's a mini with two doors front and rear seats and a turbo but it's not the standard Cooper s this model is called the paceman whatever that is let's motor in the 2013 Mini Cooper S paceman Mini basically makes a one car the Cooper with a ton of variants this paceman is the latest in the lineup joining the standard Cooper the convertible the Clubman the countryman the coupe a and the Roadster all of these cars can be had with the turbocharged s engine this paceman is the top of the line it's got the turbocharged engine so it's the Cooper S it's also got minis new all-wheel-drive system now even though it's a two-door with front and rear seats same as the standard Cooper it's got a very different design we got the slanted back roof here which I guess is kind of modern looking a little different maybe they wanted to change it up but it's also a lot bigger than the standard Cooper it's a full four inches wider it's four and a half inches taller it's also a foot and three inches longer than the standard Cooper but the seating arrangement is different so let's take a look inside and check that out I'm not crazy about the rear seat arrangement here mini puts two buckets instead of a bench that means you can definitely only fit two passengers back here between these two buckets you get this railing this is something that mini started putting into the countryman and they put it in this car as well the idea behind this railing as you can get accessories like cupholders or cell phone holders or something that's snap into place it's kind of a goofy idea but you can also fold these rear seats down maximize your cargo area so that gives you a little more utility now in the paceman here we've got the technology package with navigation so that puts a screen LCD in the middle of this big round speedometer that's a mini signature and we have this nice sort of an elliptical menu here you control everything from this little dial down here there's a button to get to the main menu we've got navigation here and the maps I'm not crazy about the look of these maps they've got these weird sort of green lines for the streets that make them look a little I don't know odd and then we've got our media sources and here we've got bluetooth streaming audio and also this iPod connector down here now this is the bad thing it still uses this Y cable down here so you have an auxiliary cable plugged into the auxiliary port ending in a 30 pin connector so that's an old-style iPod hookup but we also have this adapter here I've put in this adapter for my iPhone 5 so I can hook that up it's not the best setup but that's the only way to work it but the most unique part of this technology package is the mini connected feature so I've got those mini connected app on my phone and that means I can access this part of the menu it's a little out blue globe thing MIDI connected and those are all the connected features and there are a ton of them in this car for example we've got Google search that's of course the most useful for navigation I can just punch that up do a search for you notice about anything and it'll find all the local businesses that correspond to that search it's also got Facebook integration and Twitter so with Facebook they show your feed on the screen it's not too distracting because they don't give you a lot to read they only have the first little bit of text from each update and this thing actually can read the updates out to you I don't know if you want to sit here listening to your car read these various different updates but what you really use Facebook for is you can actually post some templated updates to your own status web radio is actually a really cool feature here so this gives you radio stations from around the world that are broadcasting on the internet you'd even choose Antarctica see what stations they have going on there well there's one called a net station playing folk radio I guess that's probably one of the Antarctic bases down there a mini connected has a few other features that are useful that actually interact with the way you're driving the car but the one that I've found recently that is really interesting is called driving excitement so the main screen is called the excitement analyzer and that has a couple different gauges here that show your acceleration your steering and you actually earn points depending on how well you do each driving task and if you look on the phone you can see like what level you've reached there's also a series of badges you can earn there's a badge for acceleration for your getting a decent 0 to 60 acceleration we also have a sports instrument display which here will show your horsepower and your torque that's those are gauges you don't normally get in the instrument cluster so it's kind of nice to be able to see that if you want you also have a force meter which shows how hard you're taking the car around the corners has a nice display shows the the mini kind of in the center and drifting to the side as you're taking the corners and putting the g-forces on it alright I mentioned this fact that this car comes with the automatic transmission that's a 1250 option comes standard with 6-speed manual and I would have preferred that it's much more fun for a mini the six-speed automatic transmission isn't too bad we've got paddle shifters here and uniquely it's gonna s'more of a BMW mini thing is you actually instead of having one side be up one side be down you actually pull up for up shift and push on them for a downshift this transmission shifts pretty fast but again the manual would be more fun there's also a sport mode in this car that's just by flipping this toggle switch puts it in sport mode puts the transmission in the sport mode and makes the throttle a lot more responsive under the hood here we've got this 1.6 liter four-cylinder engine that's pretty much the same engines of all the Cooper's have but because this is the Cooper S it's also got direct injection fuel delivery and a turbo that brings the power up to 181 horsepower 177 pound-feet of torque those are pretty decent numbers for this relatively small car it's also an economical engine innocently enough this is pretty much the same type of engine I looked at in the Nissan Juke Nismo last week let's take this guy on the road and see what it can do this car it's bigger like it's heavier there's still a good responsive steering rack here but it just doesn't have that I wouldn't call this go-kart handle doesn't have that same feel it's pretty quick you can have fun with it but I think the you know the standard mini hatchback is a little better that way I also note that this is the Cooper S so we get 181 horsepower that's I think that's necessary I would never get admit II without without the s behind the Cooper because you just don't get much power with the basic engine with the turbo and direct injection you get much more efficiency and power it's it's worth it but one thing that really suffers someone in this car from the fact that it comes with a sport-tuned suspension standard and it's got fairly low profile tires the ride quality is a little rough I mean that's supposed to aid the handling it supposed to keep it a little more stable in the corners but and really a lot of this routes fairly rapid this does not feel like that is supposed to be now the base Cooper paceman goes for 23900 delivered this model the Cooper S with the all-wheel Drive is twenty nine thousand two hundred now to go seen that style you'll want to add the technology package with navigation that's a twenty five hundred dollar option you can save a little money by shaving off navigation from that that brings it down to seventeen fifty all told that's thirty-one thousand seven hundred dollars the automatic transmission is a $1,250 option I would get the manual transmission it's a lot more fun and in fact I would get the standard Cooper s not the paceman because I think that smaller car is a lot more fun too