With the F60 in 2017 the Countryman passed 4.20 metres for the first time, making it the largest MINI there had ever been. It sits on the UKL2 platform shared with the BMW X1 F48 and the 2 Series Active Tourer, which places it mechanically closer to a BMW than to the MINIs of the eighties.
Engines ran from the three-cylinder Cooper to the John Cooper Works with a two-litre turbo and four-wheel drive. In between sat the Cooper S E ALL4, a plug-in hybrid in which the engine drives the front axle and an electric motor the rear. The F60 was built at Born in the Netherlands.
The 2020 facelift brought the Union Jack rear lights that have marked the F60 ever since; before it they were conventionally drawn. The two do not interchange, and because little else about the car changed, that is the most common wrong purchase on this model.
The hybrid adds a second quirk: a charge flap in the left front wing that a pure combustion car does not have. On a front wing it is the charge flap that decides whether the part fits, not the colour. And because the Countryman lives as a family car in tight parking spaces, doors are what we strip from it most often.
