[Tonyt3]

So is the single door on the 'wrong' side....? Well, for the UK market, it is. however, long term, for Mini, the world market is more important.

Technically however, the rear door itself is also poorly designed if you're thinking about child access/saftey for any market. The door isnt actually a suicide door, as suicide doors can be opened independantly. The Clubmans 'suicide' door can only be opened when the front door is also opened. Otherwise, rear passengers are stuck there. So, even in LHD countries, the front passenger has to exit the vehicle for the rear door to be opened. If there is in fact no front passenger (as would normally be the case for a 'school run Mom'), then the driver has to park the car, exit the vehicle, walk around the car, and open both front and 'suicide' door. Thats not a great solution either.

So the arguement is not 'is the door on the wrong side', but actually, does the door, on either side, actually make any sense? No, it doesnt, its a compromise whatever side of the road you traval on. Both designs are fatally flawed IMHO. The car would have looked much better with a symetric design. Whether 4 doors, or in fact just sticking with 2 doors, but perhaps lenghtening them slightly, or coming up with a radical door design (such as the early traveller concepts had) or better access via revised seat tilt design.

Mini spent a huge amount of money coming up with a radical design for the rear 'barn yard' door design (which to me looks fussy and poorly concieved), when quite frankly they should have probably kept the perfectly servicable rear hatch, and spent the time and money re-engineering the extended platorm to create 2 rear doors.

When you can see failures in the design from both perspectives of LHD and RHD, you have to ask, what were the designers thinking????