(make the most of multiple posts while you can get them!)
What, a rental from MINI of Peabody? No … they don’t do rentals! But IRA Audi do. However, IRA is a big dealership group, so I end up not with an Audi but with a Toyota Sienna Mini-van:
It’s bigger than the Q5, and nowhere near as stable (I felt worried going round a curve in the road at 25, through Essex!); it’s also very noisy inside – I thought as noisy as a MINI, but perhaps not; just much noisier than the Q5. Quite good engine performance, and the wierdest mish-mash of interior; HUGE space (yes, I think there’s a third row of seats way back there), and clearly a high end spec with navigation, voice commands, and a rear back-up camera … but apparently Toyota just joined together various bits from other cars, no matter what they looked like!
So we have a nice design of driver display dials, glowing various shades of blue with white needles, very attractive, but then the navigation display is very crisp bright LCD with hardly any match to the dials, and then the temperature display area is different again, with soft vacuum-fluorescent lettering. And those totally-out-of-place bits of “wood” amongst all the grey plastic, just wierd!
I think tomorrow I need my Q5 back, whether they’ve figured the “warm start” issue or not …
M&I / GBMINI 
I took Scrat to Inskip on Monday to get a couple of things looked at and took home an ’09 Cooper Clubman for a couple of days. They *do* do rentals, at $0.15/mile, which is still fairly inexpensive, although driving it to work would cost me about $15/day. It’s surprisingly peppy, both because it’s a Cooper and because it’s an auto, but I just can’t like the transmission. In Sport mode, it’s very difficult to drive smoothly in town, and never seems to lock up the torque converter. “Normal” mode is very lazy. I like the telescoping steering column (I wish I could extend my legs a little more in my R53), but the rest of the interior feels cheap and cartoony. I’m utterly perplexed by the radio and OBC: I kept reaching for the upper knob to change the volume, but that doesn’t do anything half the time! Oh, and when you turn off DSC, you get no less than *three* indicators!
Still, it’s gotta be better than a Toyota anything, let alone a mini-van. 😉
I’ve driven three MINs in the last two days: Scrat (my ’06 R53), Buffy (Sarah’s ’06 R53) and the Inskip rental. I still love mine the most, but I do have a wandering eye. I feel a 370Z test-drive coming on…
Better the Mini-van than the Pickup truck I was offered!
TOYOTA don’t “do” interior styling……………..