page_title: Mini
section_title: End of production
hierarchical_section_title: Mini / End of production
caption_attribution_description: English: 2000 Mini Cooper (X411 JOP) 1.3 Taken at the British Motor Museum, Gaydon
context_page_description: The Mini is a small economy car produced by the English-based British Motor Corporation and its successors from 1959 until 2000. The original is considered an icon of 1960s British popular culture. Its space-saving transverse engine and front-wheel drive layout – allowing 80% of the area of the car's floorpan to be used for passengers and luggage – influenced a generation of car makers. In 1999, the Mini was voted the second-most influential car of the 20th century, behind the Ford Model T, and ahead of the Citroën DS and Volkswagen Beetle. The front-wheel-drive, transverse-engine layout of the Mini was copied for other "supermini" designs including the Honda N360, Nissan Cherry, and Fiat 127. The layout was also adapted for larger subcompact designs.
  This distinctive two-door car was designed for BMC by Sir Alec Issigonis. It was manufactured at the Longbridge plant in England located next to BMC's headquarters and at the former Morris Motors plant at Cowley near Oxford, in the Victoria Park/Zetland British Motor Corporation factory in Sydney, Australia, and later also in Spain, Belgium, Italy Chile, Malta, Portugal, South Africa, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Yugoslavia.
context_section_description: Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the British market received numerous "special editions" of the Mini, which shifted the car from a mass-market item into a fashionable icon. It was this image that perhaps helped the Mini become such an asset for BMW, which later bought the remnants of BMC as the Rover Group. It was even more popular in Japan, which took the lion's share of the circa 40,000 Minis produced annually in the early 1990s. It was seen there as a retro-cool icon, and inspired many imitators. The ERA Mini Turbo was particularly popular with Japanese buyers.
  In 1994, under Bernd Pischetsrieder, a first cousin once removed of Issigonis, BMW took control of the Rover Group, which included the Mini, fitting an airbag to comply with European legislation.
  By March 2000, Rover was still suffering massive losses, and BMW decided to dispose of most of the companies. The sell-off was completed in May that year. MG and Rover went to Phoenix, a new British consortium; and Land Rover was sold to Ford Motor Company. BMW retained the Mini name and the planned new model, granting Rover temporary rights to the brand and allowing it to manufacture and sell the run-out model of the old Mini. By April 2000, the range consisted of four versions: the Mini Classic Seven, the Mini Classic Cooper, the Mini Classic Cooper Sport and—for overseas European markets—the Mini Knightsbridge. The last Mini (a red Cooper Sport) was built on 4 October 2000 and presented to the British Motor Industry Heritage Trust in December of that year.  A total of 5,387,862 cars had been manufactured, nearly 1.6 million of which were sold in Britain, although the majority of these were sold at least 20 years before the Mini's demise, meaning that the majority of those sold had been scrapped before the end of the original Mini's production life.
  After the last of the Mini production had been sold, the 'Mini' name passed to BMW ownership. Mini Hatch, the new model made by BMW, is technically unrelated to the old car but retains the classic transverse four-cylinder, front-wheel-drive configuration and "bulldog" stance of the original.
  The last Mini to leave the Longbridge plant did so in 2012, when a 1970s 1275GT which was used by staff to travel around the car plant was recovered from the disused tunnels under the plant. The car was damaged by a storage container falling on it and had been left without an engine or gearbox for around 30 years before being recovered during work to infill the tunnels. This car was sold at auction in July 2013 for £1400.
caption: The last Mini produced, a Rover Cooper Mini Sport, rolled off the Longbridge line on 4 October 2000
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