The Mini Coupé and Roadster is a 2-door coupé / 2-door roadster from Mini, built from 2011 to 2015, as electrification stopped being an experiment and the crossover took every market. Under the bonnet: 1.6 L BMW/PSA I4 Prince N18. Gert Hildebrand drew it.
How it came about
The Mini Coupé and Mini Roadster are two-seater sports cars that were engineered and manufactured by German automaker BMW under the Mini marque between 2011 and 2015. The hardtop Coupé was unveiled in June 2011 and formally launched at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September 2011. Production was shown in the 2011 documentary Megafactories.
It is the first two-seater Mini. It was joined by a convertible version called Mini Roadster in 2012, following its showing as a concept car in 2009. The Coupé is known by the internal code R58 and the Roadster by code R59. In February 2015, Mini announced the end of production for both models.
The hardware
Power comes from 1.6 L BMW/PSA I4 Prince N18; other versions carried different engines, listed in the specification table below. It weighs 1260 kg. It shifts through a 6-speed manual / 6-speed Steptronic automatic. The layout matters: the engine drives the front wheels, the packaging choice that gives a small car a big cabin. The wheelbase is 97.1 in. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Family and rivals
Its family tree is legible: its successor was the Mini Hatch F55/56/57; assembly was at Cowley, Oxfordshire (Plant Oxford), United Kingdom. Its contemporaries in the catalogue — the Lamborghini Aventador, the Lexus LFA, the Peugeot 208 — show what else the money bought that year. Its Mini stablemates include the MINI Beachcomber and the Mini (3rd Generation).
Mini1959
Mini1969
Mini (3rd Generation) 
Mini (MkI) 
Mini Coupé (R58)