New MINI Countryman vs. Old: The Surprising Differences

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Step out of a 2023 Clubman JCW and into the new Countryman S and the first thing you notice has nothing to do with size, even though size is the thing everyone wants to talk about. It’s the steering. It’s lighter. It’s quicker. And that combination does something clever: it masks how much bigger this car has actually gotten. Look at the new Countryman and your brain tells you there’s no way this thing is going to feel eager. Then you turn the wheel and it does anyway, because MINI tightened the ratio and lightened the effort enough that your hands stop believing what your eyes are telling you.

That’s a trick, and I mean that as a compliment. Automakers have been using quicker steering and lighter effort to disguise mass since long before MINI existed. It’s not a new formula. What’s notable here is how far MINI leaned into it, not just at the wheel but everywhere: the throttle takes less effort to move too. The whole car has been tuned to feel like less work, and depending on what you want from a MINI, that’s either the point or the problem.

The 2026 U25 Countryman

Where simplicity starts costing you something

We’ve written before about how good the new MINI OS actually is once you get past the bugs, and the new touchscreen genuinely handles a lot of complexity well. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the physical layer, the switchgear, or in this car’s case, the near-total absence of it.

The new Countryman has a clean, minimal cabin, and on its own that’s a good thing. But strip out physical controls for climate, seat heaters, and adaptive cruise following distance, and you’ve also stripped out the muscle memory drivers built up over years of not looking down to change them.

The F54 2023 MINI Clubman was identical to the F60 Countryman albeit lower and lighter.

The distance buttons on cruise control are a good example: in the old car, closing or opening the gap to traffic ahead was a button press away. In the new one, it’s buried in a menu you have to actually look at. Add the classic rotary shifter’s disappearance in favor of a toggle switch, and there’s a real argument that MINI simplified its way into adding cognitive load rather than removing it.

None of this is a dealbreaker. Most of it you adapt to within a day or two, the same way you adapt to any new car’s quirks, MINI or otherwise. But it’s worth sitting with the question: is stripping out physical controls actually simplifying the experience, or just moving the complexity somewhere less convenient? MINI has always liked being a little quirky and a little unique. There’s nothing wrong with that instinct. The problem shows up when quirky collides with basic functions, like turning on a heated seat, and makes them harder instead of more charming.

The 2026 U25 Countryman

A smoother gearbox that somehow feels slower

The bigger, more immediate difference is what’s behind the shifter, not the shifter itself. The old Clubman JCW runs an Aisin eight-speed torque-converter automatic, a classic automatic in the truest sense: real gears, a torque converter, no clutch packs pretending to be something else. The new Countryman runs a dual-clutch transmission instead, essentially a manual gearbox that automates itself by pre-selecting the next gear while you’re still in the current one, which lets it swap ratios almost instantly.

Day to day, the DCT wins easily. It’s smooth in a way that flatters the rest of the car, and our review of the automatic Countryman S called it buttery smooth for a reason: it will actually downshift ahead of a corner using GPS and nav data, anticipating what you’re about to ask of it before you ask. That’s genuinely impressive, and it’s the kind of engineering that makes the new Countryman feel like the most refined MINI ever built, which is exactly what we said when we spent a full week with one.

Here’s the part that surprises people, though. The Aisin eight-speed isn’t just good, it might be the best classic torque-converter automatic MINI has ever offered. It’s not perfect: there’s real lurch when you try to control it manually, and it can be jerky shifting up or down in Sport mode. But under hard acceleration, snapping off full-throttle shifts, it’s honestly quicker than the new DCT. So you end up with this strange dichotomy: the new car feels smoother in everyday driving, but takes a small step backward in outright shift speed when you’re actually pushing it. Smoothness and speed aren’t the same thing, and MINI picked smoothness.

The Shift Paddle Problem

Then there’s the bigger issue, and it’s not subtle. Unless you’re in a JCW, or a market where the JCW Style pack is available on the Countryman, you don’t get shift paddles in the new car at all. Order a Countryman S, or a base Countryman, and you’re just along for the ride with no ability to hold a gear yourself. That’s not a big deal for everyone. It’s a big deal for me, and for anyone who actually enjoys the interactivity of picking your own gear on a passing maneuver or an on-ramp.

We flagged this exact limitation when it first showed up, and we’ve since argued that even where paddles do exist, they need a rethink: the hardware is capable of much sharper responses than MINI currently allows. To its credit, MINI USA has moved on part of this. The JCW Style Package now brings paddles back to the Cooper S hardtop and convertible for a modest $1,200. The Countryman hasn’t gotten the same treatment. If you want to shift your own gears in the new Countryman, full JCW trim is still the only door in.

Which Would We Choose?

We’re deliberately not talking performance here, since the JCW and the S sit in different performance classes entirely, and we’re not talking software, because that’s an entirely separate rabbit hole that we recently touched on. This is about the physical experience: what it feels like to sit in these two cars, touch their controls, and drive them back to back.

Has MINI nailed this generation, or gone too far chasing newness for its own sake? Honestly, it depends on what you’re shopping for. If you want the classic MINI experience, tactile, a little demanding, rewarding you for engaging with it, the new Countryman will feel like it’s asking you to give some of that up. If you want a genuinely excellent daily driver, one where the physical inputs mostly disappear so the car just does what you ask, smoothly and without drama, the new Countryman is exactly that car, and arguably the best one MINI has built for that use-case.

It’s not that the new Countryman isn’t fun. It’s that fun looks different here. The friction that used to define driving a MINI, the stuff you had to work for, has mostly been engineered away. Some people will call that progress. Others will call it the thing they came to MINI to avoid in the first place.

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