The all-electric Mini Aceman desperately wants you to have a good time behind the wheel

Mini has gone all-in on electric, but there are crucial caveats. The latest generation of the venerable Cooper model is just one of three all-electric models, along with the Countryman and the Aceman, that headline a line-up that still places an emphasis on the joy of driving, the fun of simplicity and the delight of design. We’ve spent a week with the latter to see if Mini can translate its core qualities into the realm of electrification.

Navigating Mini’s website is not a straightforward task, with a plethora of powertrain and trim options that highlight the auto industry’s current need to please everyone at once. The Aceman sits firmly in the middle of the Mini range, not too big, not too small. The Cooper is still billed as the compact city or small family car (available with three or five doors or a convertible), with electrified versions of the three-door model available in various levels of trim and power output. It’s countered by the biggest Mini, the Countryman. This compact SUV comes in either lightly hybridised petrol format or as a pure EV.

The Aceman, on the other hand, is electric only. Bearing in mind that the Aceman is not particularly small, let alone mini, it takes visual elements from both its siblings, some of the chunkier style of the high-riding Countryman with the chamfered, clean look of the current clean Cooper. Inside, there are swathes of styling cues and design choices that showcase the company’s reinvigorated emphasis on material and form.

This tactility and focus isn’t unique to Mini but it’s still a rare thing in a volume car maker. Clever use of backlit textiles and surface textures, as well as contrasting colour leather trim on the JCW variant we tested make for a far more interesting and inviting interior overall, even if the details sometimes feel a bit fussy en masse.

It might come as a bit of a surprise to find that the Aceman is currently very much Made in China, rather than at Mini’s long-standing home in Cowley, near Oxford. The UK site, which has been producing cars for over a 110-years and was once home to Rover, was due to take on all Mini EV production duties from 2026. However, parent company BMW recently scrubbed that timeline for the foreseeable future, citing the usual market unpredictability.

Being built in China also hasn’t capped the cost of Minis, which are firmly ensconced in the premium sector. The Aceman EV we drove topped out at £42,900, a lot to pay for a car with a range of just 186 miles and not exactly rapid charging. The latter maxes out at 70kW, as opposed to the Volvo EX30's 153kW. The Volvo adds over another 100 miles of range and costs £39,100 for the Single Motor Extended Range model.

Mini hopes that character and brand will carry the day over both the studied Scandi minimalism of the Volvo and the personality-free tech-driven EVs coming over from Chinese brands in ever greater numbers. The exterior is clean, unfussy and a return to the simple, retro-inspired design of the very first BMW-era Mini back in 2000.

Inside, the Aceman (and Cooper) have also been stripped back but there’s still a fair amount of fuss. The first thing you note in current gen Minis is the circular screen at the centre of the dash. The distinctive row of toggle switches has been pared back to an ignition ‘key’ and driving mode selector, while pretty much everything else is now controlled via the screen.

The display is vivid and easy to read, even if the many icons are a little bit small and hard to locate when the move. Capable of switching between different visual modes, including one that references the classic single dial of the first generation Issigonis Mini, it works especially when in navigation mode. Switch to CarPlay or Android Auto, and you lose the benefit of the circular form factor.

The interface does a lot of the work defining the car’s ‘character’, with the now-traditional red hue accompanying the most sporting setting (dubbed ‘Go Kart’ mode by Mini). Each mode also gets a little audio sign-off – a countryside vignette for Eco mode and a little whirr and ‘woo-hoo’ for Go-Kart mode – which is more cringe than cute. When AIs start to imbue cars with natural language ‘assistants’, you can be sure that Mini will be first in the queue.

These quibbles don’t detract from the Aceman’s lively performance and handling. It really is a pleasure to drive, with high levels of usability thanks to its mid-league size and space. The Aceman (and Countryman) don’t have the squeezed rear passenger seats of the standard two-door Cooper, and there’s even a pretty decent boot.

Steering is direct and lively. The boost added by Go-Kart mode is signalled by a beefed-up artificial soundtrack that even goes as far as mimicking the sound of lifting off the accelerator at high revs. It would have been good to have this added pep available at the touch of a button for overtaking and junctions, rather than having to cycle through the list of modes and their accompanying sounds and animations.

That’s the Mini experience in a nutshell – the car tries a little too hard to create a sense of experience and occasion through this deluge of sound, vision, texture, graphics and more. The cumulative effect of these layers of character creation is that one always feels a little bit gamed and played in a Mini, as if the company is desperate for you to get the right impression. That’s a shame, because the Aceman is more than capable of standing on its own considerable merits.

Mini Aceman Esport, as tested £42,900, Mini.co.uk, @MiniUK