Mini Clubman

There are many, many things that suck about being a British colony. Gordon Ramsay currently tops the list, but there's also the fact that, when you visit the Mother Country, they treat you like they've just found you living in their dog's fur.
Personally, the monarchy doesn't bother me much, (although I'd prefer to be a Republic, because it has more of a Star Wars ring to it) because I find it amusing that the Poms actually pay for the excesses of those inbred clowns out of their taxes, but I do blame them for making us drive on the wrong side of the road.
A French friend of mine, Goog Le, tells me that only a quarter of the world drives on the left.
I find it remarkable that one of the only things I find difficult to do with my right hand - besides painting masterpieces and performing brain surgery - is changing gear in a left-hand-drive car.
To put it another way, unless you're one of those weird cack-handers, what else do you do well with your left hand, besides shifting cogs?
Being a left-driver is the kind of thing that only bothers you when you're overseas, visiting many of the world's finer countries, or America.
Generally we're not punished for this oddity at home, but every now and then there is some supercar that's launched that's left-hand-drive only, and thus can never be road registered in Australia.
This must be annoying for at least three of our readers.
Occasionally, though, we are reminded that, the lovely Japanese aside, most of the biggest car makers in the world engineer their cars to have the steering device on the left side, and that they find switching stuff around for us a bit of a pain.
Sometimes it's little things, like the volume control being on the left-hand side of the stereo, or the way lots of French cars have the bonnet-release lever in the passenger footwell. This is the physical embodiment of a Gallic shrug. "Stoof le puffy Angleterre, they can get out and walk around."
But the Mini Clubman rubs wrong-sidedness in your face like a rich person borrowing a $50 note and using it to wipe dog dirt off his shoes.
There are some subtle things, like the fact that, in the auto we were afflicted with, it's impossible to see what gear you've selected, because the letters are on the left and the stick is perfectly positioned to obscure them.
Oh, and the bonnet release is in the passenger's footwell. Tres chic.
But these are as nothing compared to the positioning of the rather-too-literally named suicide door.
The whole Clubman concept is aimed at making the Mini more practical for people with small, non-claustrophobic children.
Someone who saw me driving it described it as a Mini stretch limo, but that someone was an idiot. An extra 239mm does not a limo make.
In Europe, the rear-opening rear door on the right-hand side of the car no doubt makes egress easier for back-seat travellers, but over here it's unlikely you'd want to unload your children into oncoming traffic.
And just to top it off, the seatbelt is attached to the door so that you have to trip over it to get out, causing you to fall on the road.
Perhaps most incredibly of all, this car is built in England (under the angry eyes of German overlords, BMW). You can just imagine the enraged English coachbuilders shaking their heads and muttering "I thought we won the war" every time they knock out a Clubman.
Surely, but surely, they could have re-engineered the door for its home market, and us?
Sadly, the quirky-to-the-point-of-annoyingness doesn't stop there.
The rear doors might look perilously close to cute, but their design cuts rear vision not-so-neatly in half. And it's not like they open up on to some vast storage area. There's almost as much stowage in the handy bins inside the doors themselves as there is in the boot.
There's not, for example, enough room for a stroller in there. Still, compared to a normal Mini it's a Grand Canyon.
They should have just ripped out the back seats and turned it into a panel-van for dwarves.
What I do like about the doors are the groovy rear-light treatments, which have just a touch of modern, also-owned-by-Beemer Rolls-Royce about them.
Sure, it's like putting Boeing bits on a balsa-wood glider, but it looks fantastic.
As to the rest of the styling, some people seemed to really like it. Others, colloquially known as those who are right, think it's a case of messing up something very pretty for no good reason.
To these eyes, later iterations have also let down the original (as in the original redesign, circa 2001) in terms of the interior.
Cheaper, greyer and nastier plastics on the centre stack are a blight, while other bits, like the handbrake, feel strangely econo-parts bin for a car that costs serious money.
Just how serious the pricetags are caused much hooting in our office, where we played "guess the price" for our Cooper S Clubman Chilli test vehicle with satnav ($2900) , vast double-sunroof ($1840) and various other options ($1800 for a TV function I didn't realise it had was my favourite).
No one got close, because no one could believe they would seriously expect someone to pay $56,840 (the base Cooper S Clubman, unfettered, is $49,200).
So, for serious sports-car money, what kind of drive does it deliver?
Well, in handling terms, the terrific, toy-like steering and go-kartish cornering that make the Mini brand so loveable are still very much in evidence.
The ride, on run-flat tyres, is also far less crashy than I recall.
Sadly what performance there is from the 128kW 1.6-litre turbocharged engine was blunted by the six-speed Steptronic auto.
I imagine it's a 60 per cent better car with a manual, but with this transmission it's a laggy, loafsome little thing.
Engage the various sports setting, flatten the go-pedal and you get the sort of noise that makes you think you've left it in neutral.
Let the gearbox make the choices for you and it's a lurchy, laggy experience, so the only way forward is to flick it into manual mode and use the paddles on the wheel.
These plasticated levers engage each gear with the satisfying sound of a Bic being dropped on a desk, but at least they give you some control.
It's no tearaway in speed terms, but it's fast enough to launch you into corners at a reasonable lick, and that's where Minis always shine.
Even Cooper S versions are never really firecrackers, in terms of power and performance, but that's not why people buy them.
Partly it's for their grin-inducing, windy-road carving, but mainly it's a style statement.
Only people who value style over substance are willing to pay so much money for so little car, after all.
And when it comes to styling, the Clubman, with its backward-arsed back door, is a frustrating failure.
Unless you drive on the right side of the road.