Against the backdrop of fervent hand-wringing from brand purists,BMW is on the cusp of finally offering front-wheel-drive vehicles. While that's a shock to the constitution, many are pointing to the company's fine-handling Mini offerings as an article of faith that it can get this drivetrain paradigm shift right. That may be true, but there's an even more important lesson that Mini has taught the decision-makers in Munich: how to make real money on small cars.
Before Mini came along, BMW – along with seemingly every other premium European automaker – never really figured out how to coax big dollars out of American wallets without developing cars that had large footprints, at least those other than sports cars. While the automaker really got rolling in America on the strength of little bantamweights like the 2002, it veered away from small cars sometime in the '80s. BMW subsequently crashed and burned with the cut-and-shut 318ti built off its E36 3 Series and, good as it is, the 1 Series hasn't given the company meaty volume or profits, either. Among other brands, the Audi A3 has never rung up big numbers, and the less said about the painful sales figures of theVolvo C30, the better. But Mini has beat the odds, blazing a more affordable and evidently compelling trail. As of late, the company's Countryman softroader has been a massive hit worldwide. No surprise then that BMW has reconsidered bringing over its smallest softroader, the X1, to the US.
The X1 originally went on sale in Europe in 2010, and after a solid launch on its home continent, the little crossover was introduced in small-car-friendly Canada for 2012, only going on sale here in the US fresh off a minor facelift for 2013. To be clear, the X1 shares no design DNA with the even-smaller Countryman. Their engineers don't even use the same washroom – whereas the Mini is based on a front-drive chassis, the X1's architecture is a variant of the aforementioned rear-wheel-drive 1 Series, itself derived from the old E90 3 Series. Exactly none of this is bad news.
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