MINI five-door begins production - pictures

    Pictures emerge of MINI’s new five-door Hatch as it enters production in Oxford prior to going on sale this autumn.

    The first ever five-door MINI Hatch has rolled off production lines at the BMW-owned brand’s Oxford plant. The car will arrive in showrooms this autumn, and will start from £15,900 in basic MINI Cooper spec,
with each model costing £600 more than the equivalent standard three-door hatch. This new five-door model uses a stretched version of that car’s flexible UKL1 platform, which also underpins the BMW 2 Series Active Tourer and will eventually provide the base for a number of future MINIs.

    As well as an extra pair of doors, MINI’s most recent offering benefits from more legroom thanks to a 72mm longer wheelbase, and gains an additional 15mm of headroom. Aimed at young families desperate for extra space, there are three seats in the back for the first time, too, along with a boot that’s expanded from 211 litres to a more practical 278 litres.

    While the three-door Hatch’s engine line-up carries over unchanged, the five-door is also the first MINI available in an all-new Cooper SD guise, which will make its way across to the standard hatch later this year. Topping the range at £20,050, it features a 170bhp 2.0-litre turbodiesel engine – 29bhp up on the old unit – meaning the five-door’s 0-62mph sprint takes 7.4 seconds (7.3 with an auto gearbox), a half second improvement on the previous three-door SD. This latest MINI variant marks another phase in a £750 million investment programme across BMW Group UK’s production facilities from 2011 to 2015, an initiative which will help lead to the release of a new Clubman and a Convertible.

    For an alternative review of the latest MINI MINI Hatchback visit our sister site carbuyer.co.uk