In its own intriguing and conditional way, the Mini Countryman Cooper S E All4 is a fast and compelling car to drive.
Your sense of that begins to coalesce the first time you engage Sport mode and use more than half of the accelerator pedal’s travel to urge the car on from low speeds.
That directly driven electric rear axle certainly makes the most of the dynamic virtue on which any EV’s or PHEV’s driving experience depends for dramatic appeal: instant and thrusting throttle response.
Unlike some of its rivals, the Mini doesn’t need a fraction of a second to decide if it’s in the right gear, or to overcome the inertia and friction of a conventional driveline, to make a meaningful difference to your rate of progress.
Before your right foot has so much as reached all the way to the floor, the car’s off – and if it’s locked in a higher gear at fairly low revs, it will be accelerating quite a bit more forcefully than you’d think possible. Forcefully, but strangely serenely, at least until the combustion engine’s revs hit a certain level.
That the car hits 60mph from rest in 6.7sec proves that it’s almost as fast over that benchmark as a like-for-like hot hatch and faster than many from 30mph to 70mph in gear (7.5sec, fourth gear).
