Mini's three-door Cooper Paceman coupe/SUV thing—recently super-subtly refreshed for 2015—remains an enigma to us. It's not as fun to drive as the brand's bread-and-butter three-door hardtop, and it's not as practical as the five-door Countryman with which it shares a great deal of parts. Let us now throw all of those concerns out of the window, because it appears a group of interns have found the key to opening our hearts to the oddball Paceman: making it into a pickup truck!
We're so easy to please—really, you could Camino-fy anything and we're down. Be it a converted BMW M3 or the stillborn Pontiac G8 ST, any car with a bed grafted onto its rump is cool, and so it goes with this special Paceman Adventure. Starting with a Paceman S ALL4 model, complete with a 184-hp turbo four and all-wheel drive, BMW's "apprentices" chopped off the car's lid aft of the B-pillar, chucked the rear seats, and fitted a deep but short cargo bed.
- 2014 Mini Cooper / Cooper S Hardtop Driven: Maturing in All the Right Ways
- 2013 Mini Cooper S Paceman ALL4 Tested: More Style for the Not-So-Mini Mini
- Mini Cooper Paceman Research: Full Pricing, Specs, Photos, and More
Amusingly, the team also added a snorkel intake and a tough-looking roof rack with a spare tire and a row of off-road lights. And it appears as though the tailgate doesn't lower all the way, which limits its usefulness as an aperture for the bed, and raised suspension and snorkel or not, we can't see this rig fording anything deeper than a puddle without some major issues. We dig the black-over-Jungle Green paint job, though, and the meaty tires further enhance the Mini's safari-ready vibe.
As you probably surmised, Mini says the Paceman Adventure is strictly a one-off, but we don't see why it couldn't become a production reality. After all, Mini actually produced a tiny pickup in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, and the automaker is consistently spinning off funky, sales-proof variants, including the Coupe and Roadster. The only thing we'd add is a pair of Subaru Brat–style seats to the bed.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
Put the internet to work for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment