2025 Mini Countryman S All4 First Test: Almost All Good

The 2025 Mini Countryman S All4 is the brand’s latest attempt at a sporty, exciting, and fun compact premium SUV. The Countryman S certainly acts the part with athletic moves and looks the part with its unique, very on-brand styling that’s hardly boring. You can easily see where the Countryman follows the “Charismatic Simplicity” design language the Mini Aceman concept previewed in 2022; the funky geometric motif pairs well with the subtle retromod styling, which, despite the futuristic touches, maintains the brand’s visual heritage and won’t be confused for any other upscale small SUVs. Sounds good so far, right?  

Almost—the newest Countryman reminds us it’s quite possible to ruin a dish by getting just one ingredient wrong. If you’ve ever mixed up salt and sugar when baking a cake, you know exactly what we’re talking about.  

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Hipster Inside and Out

Again, most of the Countryman’s recipe is good. Matching the stylish exterior is an equally stylish interior. If you like microbrew beers, handlebar mustaches, and Wes Anderson film festivals, you’ll feel right at home inside the Mini Countryman S All4. Rather than leather, the Countryman’s interior is adorned in Vescin, a sustainable fabric made from recyclable materials. More interesting is the “knit” fabric that covers the dashboard. It almost looks like someone wrapped it in their favorite sweater.  

The cabin overall fits like that same sweater, being comfortably spacious for five adults with decent legroom and headroom for all passengers. The front seats are heated but not ventilated for cooling. That’s kind of a bummer, but considering we drove the Countryman in the middle of December, we didn’t miss ventilated seats that much.  

Rear cargo space is serviceable but not spectacular. You could fit two large luggage rollers with a little bit of space left over before you’d have to fold the rear seats down for more storage space.  

With the minimalist design throughout, the materiality takes center stage. Next to the chunky steering wheel that’s clearly borrowed from Mini’s parent company, BMW, the eye is drawn to the 9.4-inch round OLED display—the first of its kind, according to Mini. Beneath the round screen is a toggle-switch gear selector, a “key” switch, and another toggle for the Mini “experiences.”  

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About That User Interface…

There was a time when a vehicle’s infotainment user interface (UI) and operating system (OS) were afterthoughts—automakers simply slipped little single-DIN radios into standard-sized slots in car dashboards and called it a day. Today, things have changed significantly, along with customer expectations, and a vehicle’s operating system is crucial to the ownership experience. The UI in the Countryman falls short.  

On this test car, that stunning round OLED display exhibited laggy response and in general proved periodically nonfunctional. Wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay phone integration is included, and we've had several positive experiences with wireless CarPlay, but maybe the factory workers swapped salt for sugar when programming this car for Android Auto, because it kept dropping out and reconnecting every five minutes or so, taking 10-20 seconds for the system to reconnect each time. 

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Making matters worse is that even when we plugged in the phone into the USB port to establish a stronger connection, it failed to recognize the cable perpetuating the same wireless connectivity issues.  

Before you ask, the Android phone being used was brand new and had all the latest updates and had no issue connecting to any other vehicle from the test fleet. We updated the Mini’s software to see if that would fix the issue, but it only made things worse as it stopped connecting to Android Auto altogether and introduced occasional graphical glitches visible on the touchscreen. Oh, and our Mini’s native navigation system also bit the dust, forcing us to bust out the ol’ paper maps and way-find the classic way. Testing an iPhone on this car, we experienced none of the same issues with Apple CarPlay and the experience is much better overall, with no connection drops or navigation hiccups.  

Even without a phone connected, we found this car’s round display wasn’t particularly good at registering inputs, and even when it did, there was some lag between the touch and execution of the request, making simple adjustments like the HVAC temperature frustrating. Even the custom driver profile feature—which lets multiple drivers create bespoke memory settings, in effect, for various vehicle parameters—was forgetting certain settings every time the ignition was cycled.  

It should be noted that we recently tested the EV and JCW versions of the Countryman All4 which run the same software and we didn’t experience any connection or navigation issues with Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. 

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Fun to Drive, If Not to Use 

The 2025 Mini Countryman S All4’s 241-hp turbocharged 2.0-liter engine is zippy and satisfying to push through its powerband. The 295 lb-ft of torque is just enough for satisfyingly getting up to speed on an onramp or making a pass, and though the 5.8-second zero-to-60-mph time isn’t blazingly quick, it handily beats the last-generation Mini Cooper S Countryman we tested by 1.3 seconds.  

Mini keeps you from maximal fun by not including paddle shifters or any method to go through the gears in a semi-automatic fashion—an omission we’ve lamented on other new-generation (non-JCW) Minis that is curious for such a sporty brand as it abandons manual transmissions for automatics. 

Sporty tuning shines through elsewhere, at least. The sharp steering delvers plenty of feedback, and good road feedback filters through the suspension, making the Countryman fun to drive when the roads are smooth and clear. When the road surface gets rough, the experience gets jittery; the firm ride quality won’t rattle your teeth loose, but we do wish the suspension soaked things up a little better and struck a better balance between athleticism and comfort. After all, this Countryman shares bones with BMW’s X1 subcompact SUV, which shows what these mechanicals can do. 

At the test track, the Countryman performs admirably during braking tests, halting from 60 mph in a short 109 feet, 12 feet better than its predecessor. “This is how a not-so-mini SUV should feel when your foot moves to make it stop,” technical writer Jered Korfhage said. “Just the right amount of resistance, and ABS leaves you alone until you’re using 75 percent of your stopping power.” 

In our figure eight lap test, the Countryman performs slightly better than some of the other 2025 Mini models we’ve tested, aided by its high 0.90 g of lateral grip. “Overall, I feel like this is as sporty as anyone would like a compact SUV to be,” road test editor Chris Walton said. “That said, I doubt anyone would ever find Go-Kart mode, use it, or even come close to exploring the limits in that mode.” 

Speaking of, the Countryman has Mini’s “experiences” functions, which are like drive modes, with the exception that only some experiences alter parameters like throttle response and transmission shift calibration. That Go-Kart experience mentioned above makes everything more aggressive, while the Green experience dulls them all for greater efficiency. All the other experience modes use a “normal” setting in the middle, while Trail experience facilitates finer throttle control for carefully surmounting obstacles. 

There’s a Big “But” Here

We've hailed this third-generation Mini Countryman as the best one yet. It’s larger, more stylish, and a better performer than past iterations while more or less holding the line on pricing. It carries one huge, 9.4-inch-OLED-touchscreen-shaped asterisk, though; as this system presents more things that can go wrong and when they do the result can be pretty darned frustrating. But when they get the recipe just right, the Countryman S All4 can be great big fun.