2005 MINI Cooper Road Test

Flying at Low Altitudes

It looks like we were all wrong. 2005 is fast approaching, but where's my flying car? My floors aren't cleaned by a

A MINI Cooper, an immortalized slice of 1960s pie, hardly the sort of vehicle a person from 1960 would have figured the masses would be driving in the year 2005. (Photo: Justin Couture, American Auto Press)

robotized vacuum, my homework's not being done by a room-sized machine full of blinking and flashing lights, and the last time a human landed on another celestial body, my parents were still in university.

Our time is really nothing like most imagined it back in the '50s, or at least it's not like the 21st century as projected in that decade's sci-fi films and Saturday morning cartoons such as the Jetsons. My heartfelt condolences go out to science fiction script writers who would have had dramatically less successful careers had they known the future would, for a large part, be about looking to the past, indulging in nostalgia.

Speaking of retro, what is it that I'm driving this week? A MINI Cooper, an immortalized slice of 1960s pie, an icon that belongs alongside the Beetles, JFK, and the first landing on the moon, hardly the sort of vehicle a person from 1960 would have figured the masses

The new MINI has been called in for a mid-cycle update just two and a half years after its initial introduction. (Photo: Justin Couture, American Auto Press)

would be driving in the year 2005. Few would have figured that the original Mini would have lasted more than 40 years without a replacement, a testament to its solid engineering and sheer intuitiveness. Heck, it even outlasted the world's first and only supersonic airliner, the Concord, a glimpse of the future now permanently grounded in aerospace museums. While the original Mini is now grounded just like the Concords, a new MINI lives while supersonic air transport is, for the time being, once again the stuff of dreams. It seems a bit odd then, considering just how long the first generation Mini lasted without a major update, that the new MINI has been called in for a mid-cycle update just two and a half years after its initial introduction.