Tested! The 2025 Mini Countryman JCW All4 Is Our Mini Wish, Granted

Our first impression of the 2025 Mini Countryman John Cooper Works All4 is that this might be what happened if a dejected 1961 Austin Mini Countryman wandered out onto the Playland boardwalk, dropped a quarter into the Zoltar machine, made a wish, and woke up the next morning to find it granted.

Rolling down the street, the Mini Countryman totally passes as a modern adult’s luxury compact SUV, but inside it’s a great big kid. Hanks’ Josh character sang “Down Down Baby” to convince his bestie of his true identity, and here you need only toggle the display screen to Timeless Mode to see a rendering of the original dash (perhaps rendered to scale on this way larger new dashboard). And the myriad options for playful graphics to display on that screen may be all it takes to steer many buyers away from a BMW X1, Mercedes GLA, or Volvo XC40 in much the same way that Josh’s “intuition” into what kids like earned him a VP toymaking job in Big. But how does the rest of the car hold up?

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Big, Childlike Fun

The 2025 Mini Countryman John Cooper Works All4 is the British kissing cousin to the top-performing BMW X1 and X2 M35i models. They share their powertrain specs to the letter, most of the same suspension underpinnings, tire choices—the works. The Mini stands 0.6 inch taller than the X1, but it’s 2.3 inches shorter in the parallel parking direction. Curb weight falls smack in between our last X1 and X2 M35i test cars, so it’s no shocker that the acceleration performance is similarly close: 0–60 mph in 4.9 seconds on the way to a 13.6-second, 102.8-mph quarter mile. The lower, sleeker BMWs crossed the finish line a blink ahead, but quite surprisingly, it’s the Mini that wins all our handling tests.

Braking from 60 to 0 takes just 100 feet—19 fewer than the X1 M35i on the exact same 20-inch Pirelli P Zero tires and 5 less than our X2 on 21-inch Conti EcoContact 6Qs. (Some credit may be due the $500 JCW Performance Brakes on our early-build car, which feature four-piston monobloc front calipers borrowed from the BMW M3/M4 and have yet to be released for U.S. customer ordering, so maybe hold off ordering?) Lateral stick of 0.99 g beats the 0.86 g posted by both Bimmers, and our figure-eight lap result of 25.1 seconds at 0.79 average g topped the X1 by 0.8 second and 0.10 g, and the X2 by a full second and 0.07 g.

Our test drivers find these cars willing partners on the figure eight, though the Mini’s steering calibration is maybe a bit too overeager just off-center. It changes direction a bit too easily before the effort ramps up, prompting testing director Eric Tingwall to wonder whether this may not be “more performance than most people want, especially considering the ride comfort compromises that come with it. I’m not sure there’s anything quite like this Countryman,” adding “maybe there’s a reason for that.”

Scanning competitors from outside the family, this Mini handily outperforms the Mercedes-AMG GLA35 4Matic, Alfa Romeo Tonale Veloce eAWD, Volvo XC40 B5 AWD, and Cadillac XT4 AWD Sport, among which only the GLA eclipses the Mini in but a single parameter—its 24.8-second figure-eight lap.

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Playful Interior

Come for the performance, stay for the daily engagement you’ll have with this Easter-egg-laden interior. The star attraction is the industry-first 9.4-inch round OLED screen you’ll swear was programmed by Pixar “imagineers” hellbent on leveraging its dazzling 1280 x 720–pixel resolution. Each of the driving and ambiance modes transforms the look of the screen. Tread lightly in Green mode, and you see a hummingbird. Toe into the throttle, and there’s a leaping puma. A trip-meter screen includes an image of the car in which the wheels steer and spin realistically, with lighting reflecting reality. When coasting in Balance mode, the power meter pointer becomes a spinning daisy. There must be hundreds more.

Each mode gets its own “earcon,” sound effect. “WooHoo” for the sportiest Go-Kart mode, various musical chords for others. Patterns of light projected from the back of the display onto the cloth dashboard surface and ambient lighting further augment each mode. And for once, all the flash doesn’t render the interior unusably complex. Wireless Apple CarPlay or Android Auto displays fill a square area within the screen, and the size is such that drivers can easily hang their fingers or a thumb on an edge to steady their hand while pressing virtual buttons. A separate screen that rises and lowers from directly in front of the driver provides a budget head-up display for speed, turn-by-turn navigation, gauges, plus vital information—like how many of your 10 seconds of Boost mode remain (with everything set for max performance). Of course, it’s hard to resist glancing at the giant countdown clock on the center screen, as background designs morph with each numeral.

We love the cloth straps that serve as the lower-center steering-wheel spoke and to open the center console storage bin, but that tiny bin is of questionable utility. The seats are comfortable, and by simply toggling the mode-selector switch to the comfort-oriented Balance mode, they begin a massage program. (Massage can be summoned and tailored via the screen, but simply visiting Balance mode is easier—and the massage continues in any other mode except Green.) Rear seating is also comfy, with a backrest split that allows 40/20/40 folding for optimal passenger/cargo/passthrough functionality.

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Petulant Steering Assist

With so much attention paid to the screen and mode curation, driver assist systems may have gotten shorter shrift in development. With both hands resting as comfortably as possible on a wheel with cartoonishly large thumb rests, the system nevertheless hectors the driver to return their hands to the wheel (via amber lights on the wheel and multiple display warnings). Gentle steering inputs fail to register, requiring bigger inputs that, if they’re too big, disable the system, sending it into a deep snit.

The sooner every automaker adopts capacitive touch sensing or uses cameras to detect hands on wheels, the better. Until then, maybe think twice about opting for the $900 Comfort Package Max, which includes Active Driving Assistant Pro.

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Living With the Maxiest Mini

Sure, the John Cooper Works gear sharpens the ride quality; the All4 hardware occasionally permits enough front-wheel slip on snow to invoke wheel-hop (and enough dry slip to allow a clean hole-shot); and that big, fat, dumb steering wheel is annoying. But in a sea of same-ish SUVs, this Mini really presents a fresh take on transportation.

Infrequent passengers will be agog at the screen and its customization—especially if you park and stream some video or demonstrate its integrated gaming capability using your phone as a controller. And if Mini purists decry its relatively elephantine size, you can blame market forces for driving its class-competitive passenger and cargo volumes.

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Is the Mini Countryman JCW Worth It?

At $47,895 to start, it undercuts both BMW cousins by a little and that AMG GLA35 by a lot. At $51,995, those competitors that are cheaper typically won’t be discounted by the percentage their performance deficit warrants. And during our week with the Mini, as various annoyances arose, we just found it to be too darned much fun to hold any sort of grudge against—you know, like the way a cute grandkid can get away with anything.