Chat, is MINI cooked? Two consecutive quarters of double digit sales declines, 153 days supply.

Flair here is going to make me appear a little biased lol. And FWIW I quite like my F66, dinner plate screen and all😂😂 I think they are in a weird position where they’ve been trying to branch away from their existing customer bases into new segments, particularly with the Countryman, in going after the slightly upscale CUV buyers. It’s always been a niche, and I think they maybe went a little too radical in terms of changes that alienated some of the die-hards. US sales have been solid, but if 2026 continues to be a downward trend like Q1, then it’s more cause for concern. BMW was also down, and MINI has such low volume to begin with in comparison, 10% drops look worse than they are. It still isn’t good though, not saying otherwise. The biggest thing they need to fix is marketing. They have sucked at marketing for a long time. I was on the dealer side for a bit, and they could never get their shit together with marketing. They constantly changed messages and vibes and never kept a consistent message or people in place to really give the brand a voice. Taking styling changes out of it, the current products (and generation before) mechanically are really solid little cars. But you wouldn’t know, because BMW never has addressed publicly the mistakes it made with the R56-era models that damaged the brand’s reputation severely, nor have they made any effort to promote how far the build quality has come since then. They need to get eyes on the product. Think about the Italian Job, it was basically a MINI commercial. And I can tell you, working auto shows near 20 years after the fact, people still talked to us all the time about how it made them want a MINI. But if nobody knows your product exists or thinks it’s shit based on outdated reliability reputations, it’s not gonna sell. I also think getting rid of the manual entirely was a dumb idea. US dealers were pissed about it too. The corporate heads in Germany have always not really quite understood what the brand is, nor how it exists in different markets. For example, the Aceman would have been a slam dunk in the US market if it were ICE or hybrid, AWD, and in the $35-45k range. Instead, they made it an EV, utilized a Chinese platform which has now made it near impossible to sell globally because of trade tensions which were already going on during its planning, and the only AWD option they have here is the Countryman, which is too big for a lot of prospective buyers (even if it’s done well with the more general market). I think MINI needs to take a hard look at what it wants to be, and to whom, commit to a fucking strategy, and actually tell people about it.