We feared this might be the case after learning all about the latest Mini Cooper, but now it’s confirmed: The manual Mini is dead.
Confirmation of the news comes from Mini boss Stefanie Wurst via an interview with Top Gear.
“We won’t have a manual, unfortunately,” Wurst told TG in reference to the new generation of Cooper.
Mini revealed its new model last week in the lead-up to the Munich Motor Show, and while the company was happy to share all the details on the electric E and SE, the gas models remained shrouded in a bit of mystery. We know there will be a base and an S model powered by gasoline engines, and now we know that they will be exclusively equipped with automatic transmissions.
The elimination of the manual transmission is a tad ironic, given Mini just recently opened a Mini Manual Driving School in California. The point of that school was to teach people how to operate a manual transmission, but now Mini won’t have any in its lineup come 2025. This news was also foreshadowed a bit by the introduction of the Mini John Cooper Works 1 to 6 Edition earlier this year. Mini made that model as an ode to the manual, and it limited production to just 999 units worldwide. It looks like that special edition is more of a send-off to the manual transmission than anything at this point.
As of now, you can still get the manual transmission on the Mini Hardtop and Convertible models, but the 2024 model year will be the end of this generation of Mini, and with it, the end of the manual transmission in the lineup.
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