I had the opportunity to sit in a Roadster today (as well as a Coupe). While I like the look of the Roadster (I have a problem with that whole baseball cap thing that passes as a roof on the Coupe) and it was generally pretty comfortable what struck me was the impaired visibility out the front windshield. I'm not all that tall, about 5' 10 ish, and looking up out the front windshield to look up at a traffic light (for example) you are going to see the black upper edge of the windshield blocking your line of sight. It was even worse in the Coupe where of course your vision is blocked by the roof, which would be also be a problem for the Roadster if the top is up. The roof line in my Cooper does this as well, but the roof line in the Coupe and Roadster is much lower and the visibility is significantly worse. This seems to be a car for relatively short drivers. It rather put me off even though overall I thought the Roadster looked pretty good.

I had the opportunity to sit in a Roadster today (as well as a Coupe). While I like the look of the Roadster (I have a problem with that whole baseball cap thing that passes as a roof on the Coupe) and it was generally pretty comfortable what struck me was the impaired visibility out the front windshield. I'm not all that tall, about 5' 10 ish, and looking up out the front windshield to look up at a traffic light (for example) you are going to see the black upper edge of the windshield blocking your line of sight. It was even worse in the Coupe where of course your vision is blocked by the roof, which would be also be a problem for the Roadster if the top is up. The roof line in my Cooper does this as well, but the roof line in the Coupe and Roadster is much lower and the visibility is significantly worse. This seems to be a car for relatively short drivers. It rather put me off even though overall I thought the Roadster looked pretty good.
I've always struggled with visibility upwards from the mini windscreens and this is very much exacerbated in the Coupe.

A couple of years ago I bought a visibility strip from lightinsight.com which is placed at the top of the screen and gives excellent vision for traffic lights etc. I have had this in my last three minis and it has worked on them all; the coupe is no exception. I think it cost about £3 - £4 at the time.

We had a coupe for the day yesterday and after driving a couple of hundred kms were very impressed. I was very concerned about visability out of the front but especially the back. My husband is 6 foot and I am 5ft 10 so both pretty tall. We did a few tests with cars coming up both sides and can see them in the mirrors until they are nearly next to you when possible to do a quick head check like normal out the drivers or passengers window. No problems seeing traffic lights but we are in Australia so not sure how high the lights are in other countries.

Just have to work out what colour we want now before ordering one!

I was less concerned about the front, but I'm only 5'7" so...but the back was horrible and I'm used to short cars with low slung windshields.

But that rear window was absolutely tiny.

That said, I ended up with the hatch.