After 55 years and 1.1 million units made, the Mini Clubman is now officially no more. The very last example of the oddball (but lovable) Mini has now rolled off the assembly line at the carmaker’s Oxford plant, and now work will begin revamping the facility for an electric future.
Of course, we’ve already known about the Clubman’s impending demise for some time – the company even launched a limited ‘Final Edition’ for the model last year, as a final swansong to the split-doors Mini, with 20 of those somewhere in Malaysia. Still, it’s always a little sad when we lose another car that was trying something different, to more boring SUVs.
The Clubman silhouette, according to BMW, dates back to the early 1960s, when then Mini owner British Motor Corporation decided to fuse four distinct models – two wagon variants of the original Mini, and two other luxury-spec variants – into one.
Since then, the Mini Clubman has evolved over three generations, each growing bigger with more tech and more power – in fact, the Clubman was also the first model in Mini’s line-up ever to feature all-wheel drive, with the introduction of the Clubman ALL-4 back in 2016.
But all of them have one thing in common – they all still come with the iconic (despite slightly problematic and engineering-wise challenging) split rear doors. And now, the final “barn doors” have been shut for the last time.
The Clubman’s place in the Mini line-up will be taken over by the Countryman, which shouldn’t be all that surprising given the company sells twice as many Countrymans as the Clubman. Below that, a smaller fully-electric crossover model dubbed Aceman, due to launch sometime in 2024, will join the Mini Cooper hatch to round up the line-up.
You were never our favourite (except when in the JCW guise), but we’ll still miss you. Rest in power, Mini Clubman.
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