How The New MINI Interior Blends High-Tech With Retro Charm

It's easy to look back on the past with a little fondness and nostalgia. You can pop on some rose-tinted spectacles and gaze back at a time when housing was affordable, gas was cheap, and vehicle interiors were a bit simpler. Mini seems to be doing a similar thing, and the new interiors going into the 2024 models and beyond draw heavily on the simple, comforting, 1960s layout of the original Mini Cooper. Still, as nice as nostalgia is, people expect more from the inside of their cars in 2023, and behind the vintage facade is plenty of functionality.

The German-owned British icon has recently announced it is launching a new set of interior features, new digital interfaces, and a revamped "Mini sound DNA" system. Some of the interfaces — like core, green, and go-kart — pair with existing driving modes on the vehicle. So, in Go Kart mode, your interior will reflect the racing nature of your Mini's setup. There are eight experience modes in total: trail, personal, vivid, timeless, core, balanced, go-kart, and green. Each one promises to offer something different. The new features strike a delicate balance between the cool, fun, youthful image Mini has been projecting for a long time now, and vintage touches that will take you back to a time when you had to manually tune in the radio.

While sitting inside a new Mini, you may be struck by how minimalist it actually is. Instead of a mass of buttons in the center, the vehicle has gone back to its roots. This includes the round "instrument panel" — which these days means a sizable OLED screen almost 9.5 inches across — and a UI option resembling the car's original analog instrument cluster. There's also a toggle bar, a small row of toggle switches that can be used to turn various elements of the vehicle on or off. There is also a little turn key, which may cause confusion if we hit the point where people are used to starting cars with a simple button press at any point during this vehicle interior's run. 

It's not all nostalgia though. There are still some modern elements, including LED lighting that can be set to play alongside your music or customized to match your style. This ties in well with the knitted dash cover, which itself comes in a variety of options. One of them is a map of London, because (if you've somehow missed this) the Mini has a close association with 1960s Britain — one of the two periods when the island nation was inexcusably cool on an international level.

The Mini's interior may be looking back to the past, but the software that powers it is getting a thoroughly modern update. "Mini Operating System 9" will be making its debut on new Mini models being unveiled in just a few months time, though some of its features will be released on a rolling basis and some markets may receive them before others. Features include a new voice assistant with a "brand specific appearance and voice." The assistant is capable of telling utterly terrible jokes, navigating your vehicle's menus, and handling other tasks that may distract you from the road ahead. 

One of the biggest updates comes to the car's navigation system, which promises to reduce your chances of getting lost by always being "online" via "The Cloud." The system is also embracing Mini's electric future and will be capable of showing "charging optimized routes" that can get you to your destination as quickly as possible, while also reducing your chances of winding up at the roadside with a stone dead battery. 3D visualization is also being added, which should help if you find navigating flat maps a pain, and there'll be wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto if you'd rather use your smartphone's apps.

The update contains a good variety of customization options which pair well with the features of the new interior. Users can select from a number of "experience modes" which change the background and color schemes of the OLED display. If your Mini has LED lighting, that will also change to match the color scheme of your experience mode. But the new update goes further than that.

There's also a "personal" mode which allows users to upload a display photo and build the profile around that. The display will then pull the main colors from the image and use them to set up the rest of the theme. So if you want your kids, or your dog, or Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas to be the central focus of your vehicle, that is totally an option. The interior of your Mini can be unique to you, and you don't even need to crack out the socket set.

Mini has also developed "sound profiles" unique to its display modes. So expect to hear something different when flicking between the core, go-kart, timeless, and balance driving modes. This Mini Sound DNA concept also stretches to the experience modes on offer, with each one featuring a unique jingle. While this maybe isn't as exciting as the release of a new performance mode, BMW insists it's still pretty important: little touches like this create atmosphere, and vehicles like the Mini are all about driving experience.

Online entertainment features heavily in modern infotainment systems, as traditional road trip entertainment like playing "I Spy" or assaulting a fellow passenger whenever a VW Bug is spotted goes the way of the dinosaurs. Standard apps like Spotify are integrated seamlessly into Mini's display, and can be accessed via a widget on the home screen.

Video streaming, and even video games are also possible — the latter coming courtesy of AirConsole which appeared on web browsers close to a decade ago, and has recently been central to the potential gaming offerings of several vehicles including Honda, Tesla, and Mini's parent company BMW. Passengers can use their smartphone as a controller for titles like Mario Kart, and there'll be optional 5G connectivity baked-in. 

With support for remote software updates, it's unsurprising that Mini is also promising more to come from future infotainment upgrades. While details of just what's on the roadmap haven't been shared yet, features borrowed from its BMW parent could mean Minis with Level 3 Self Driving hit the road in the next few years. A similar system to the one BMW is launching would boost infotainment beyond something that keeps passengers distracted, and make these updates far more enticing.

So we have the interiors, we have the entertainment system, now we just need to see the cars they're going to be fitted into. Mini is set to unveil its next generation of electric models — including the new Mini Cooper Electric — which the update will debut on, in September.