Mini Aceman 2025 review: Mini hopes electric crossover will be its ace in the pack, but is it actually a joker?
Someone’s taken the P
Do you remember the Mini Paceman? Bonus motoring-nerd kudos points to you if you do, but conversely we wouldn’t blame you if you don’t. By Mini’s own high standards, it wasn’t exactly a sales juggernaut — the company was coy about quoting the exact number of Pacemans (Pacemen?) that came to the UK, but if a cursory glance of “How Many Left” is any indication, at most there were a little more than 10,000 on our roads. Today, around 9,600 survive.
This is because the Paceman was an oddity that was only on sale for four calendar years, from 2012 to 2016. It was a three-door version of the existing Countryman crossover, and eventually Mini’s parent company BMW canned it because chiefs there reckoned it was too close in principal to the Countryman to succeed in the long-term.
So, it’s an unusual thing for Mini to reference with its latest product, in which someone has taken the P out of the older car to leave us with the Aceman.
Once again, it’s supposed to be closely related to the Countryman, but mercifully this time Mini has decided not to try to create a coupé-crossover. Instead, the Aceman can exist because the Countryman has suffered a little with bloat over the years, which means it is now so big that there’s room in the line-up for a smaller crossover beneath it.
But the Aceman doesn’t use the Countryman’s underpinnings. Instead, it sits on the same platform used by the Cooper Electric hatchback, and that means it was developed in conjunction with Great Wall Motors, the Chinese company which makes the Ora 03 (the erstwhile Ora Funky Cat).
All of this means that the new Mini Aceman references one of the company’s less wildly successful models, it fits into a very narrow product gap between the Cooper electric hatch and the ever-larger Countryman family car, and it’s distantly related to one of the most bizarrely named vehicles of recent years.
If that doesn’t seem like the most auspicious of starts for the Aceman, don’t worry. We drove it around Denmark on the international launch, from the capital Copenhagen and into the surrounding countryside. And wherever we went, people on pavements were pointing their smartphones at this new Mini, proving that the marque’s desirability — and the novelty value of a previously unseen model variant — is as strong as ever.
And you only have to take one look at it to know it will sell like the proverbial warm bakery products over here. This is not going to be the Paceman all over again, that’s for sure.
The Aceman’s appearance is informed by both the Cooper and the Countryman, in that it has some of the “cutesiness” factor of the former, with its oversized features and rounded appearance to the shoulders of the car, but plenty of the angularity of the latter — look at those polygonal daytime running lamps — along with rugged detailing such as skid plates (fakes, obviously), black-plastic lower body cladding, and a set of luggage rails on the roof.
The overall appearance is one that is clearly designed to win hearts in Mini showrooms, whereupon the high-quality cabin of the Aceman will probably get more than enough customers to sign on the dotted line there and then.
You don’t have to search too far lower down on the various fascias to find some materials and finishes which aren’t quite at top-notch premium levels in the Aceman, as the car has to be built to a certain cost, to make it fit neatly into Mini’s product portfolio.
But everything above the beltline of the cabin is excellent. There are clever uses of various different textiles and surface coverings to provide plenty of visual and tactile interest, while classy ambient lighting gives an upmarket mood at night.
The centrepiece of the Aceman’s dash, as it is in the Cooper and Countryman electric models, is the 9.4in circular infotainment screen, complete with “Spike” the intelligent virtual assistant — rendered as a cartoonish bulldog with one floppy ear.
This whole system looks superb and operates slickly enough, but there’s an overreliance on its touchscreen capabilities for almost all of the Mini’s in-car functions, including most of the heating, ventilation and climate controls.
Still, the Aceman isn’t alone in this trait — most of its rivals have similarly button-free cabins, so it’s not as if the Mini is the only one asking its owners to learn a frankly baffling level of menus and submenus on the central screen.
For comfort and practicality, the new Mini crossover tends to score quite highly, but if there’s one area where the cabin is a let down then it’s in terms of rear-passenger space. Set the driver’s seat for only an average-height driver, and kneeroom behind the front chair is limited in the extreme. Mini claims the Aceman is a full five-seater, but if three people are going to sit across the back bench side by side, they’re all going to have to be diminutive.
And considering the Aceman will be electric-only in terms of powertrains, we’re confused as to why there’s a hump in the centre-footwell position, further limiting the room for the passenger sitting in that seat.
Otherwise, though, front-seat passenger space is ample, there are useful storage solutions dotted around the Aceman’s cabin, visibility out of the car in all directions is excellent, and the 300-litre boot is adequate. It’s not huge by the standards of these crossovers and considerably less than you’d get in a family hatch like a Volkswagen Golf (that holds 381 litres), but big enough that overall the Mini should be usable for a young family of four with smaller children.
From launch, power in the Aceman line is exclusively electric, and it is intended to stay that way.
It’s why, at £31,800, the Aceman’s starting price looks chunky against the Cooper and the Countryman cars, which kick off at £23,150 and £29,350, respectively. But those figures are for the examples of those machines fitted with petrol engines; equip them with electric power and the corresponding numbers read £30,000 and £42,080, which makes the Aceman look much better value in its own stable.
The Mini is also cheaper than almost all of the comparable compact electric crossovers from the Stellantis group of cars — such as the Peugeot E-2008, Jeep Avenger Electric and Alfa Romeo Junior Elettrica — although the Vauxhall Mokka Electric is more affordable. But the Aceman usefully undercuts Volvo’s EX30, a similarly premium electric crossover.
Where it struggles to fully convince is in terms of the electric range. There are two models, a 181bhp E and a more powerful 214bhp SE, which is what we’re driving here.
Those figures are a lot more than any of the Stellantis electric crossovers serve up (typically 154bhp), yet it’s the size of the battery packs that go with the motors in the Aceman line which concerns.
The E has a comparatively small battery pack with a capacity of 38.5kWh, which results in a very modest on-paper range figure of between 186 and 192 miles, depending on spec. Realistically, that’s going to be more like 150 miles to a charge, and that doesn’t seem to be anything like enough for a crossover like this, even one aimed at “modern urbanites” (whatever they happen to be).
The SE makes more sense, with an enlarged 49.2kWh battery, but even then the Aceman has one of the less-generous power packs on the market, which in turn results in a theoretical 252-mile maximum.
At least recharging a smaller battery will take less time — 31 minutes at the Aceman SE’s maximum 95kW DC rate, or up to nine hours for a typical 7.4kW domestic AC wallbox.
For performance, the SE definitely feels like the right sort of level of speed for the Aceman.
Powering 1.8 tonnes of car, which is not inconsiderable, acceleration from this more potent electric motor is nonetheless sprightly with a 0-62mph time of 7.1 seconds. But that one printed metric alone doesn’t tell you how easy it is to drive the Aceman SE in a wide variety of scenarios.
It’s really swift at moving into faster-moving traffic on motorways, for example, and it zooms away from 30mph zones in an eager fashion.
Some might tire of the weird electrical sound effects which overlay the Aceman’s performance in certain modes, but they will be switchable and we don’t happen to mind them half as much as we do when electric vehicles try to mimic cars with petrol engines.
The regenerative braking is also well judged by Mini’s engineers, so driving the Aceman around smoothly on just one pedal is a cinch.
When it comes to ride and handling, there’s also good news and bad. Out of town and at speeds in excess of about 50mph, the Aceman tends to ride with genial good grace, while the passenger compartment is nicely isolated from noise contributors such as the car cutting through the airflow or the tyres rolling over the road.
It corners sweetly enough, too. It’s by no means the most thrilling thing Mini has ever created, of course, but as electric crossovers go, the Aceman probably has better steering and finer body control than most of its key rivals.
The main issue with the overall rolling refinement and enjoyment of the way this electric vehicle drives relates to the ride comfort at town speeds.
Too often, our test car — running on optional 19in alloy wheels — thumped, crashed and bashed its way over only medium-sized imperfections on urban streets.
That, coupled with an odd sensation occasionally that the front and rear axles were bouncing up and down at differing rates on washboard-type surfaces, meant the Aceman wasn’t always the most comfortable companion for getting around a city’s congested thoroughfares.
So the Aceman is by no means without its flaws. A too-often brittle low-speed ride, poor rear-seat packaging and a modest amount of range are its most obvious weaknesses.
But it will undoubtedly sell in far greater numbers than the Paceman its name invokes, because it’s undeniably a better all-round product than that old coupé-crossover. Taking the P out of the Paceman wasn’t such a bad business idea at all.
Related articles
- If you found this review of the new Mini Aceman interesting, you may want to read our review of the new electric Mini Cooper SE
- Or read more about Mini’s built-in video gaming system
- Or read our review of another reinvention, the new Renault 5 E-Tech
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