Yee. And, indeed, haw. MINI has created the car many (well, some; well, few; ok, perhaps not many) have been waiting for it to make since BMW recreated the brand in 2000 - a pickup. MINI of course has been here before, with the diminutive Mini pickup of the sixties, a car for the cost conscious builder or for those who just couldn't manage backing a Ford Thames flatbed into a tight urban construction site.
As you might well imagine, the new MINI pickup is somewhat different. For a start, while the original Mini pickup was based on the MINI van, the new one is based on the Paceman coupé. And it's not (at least not yet) a production model. It's actually a Saturday Morning Special - a car created by engineering and design apprentices at the BMW Group, more or less in their spare time. Instead of the chopped-down roofline of the familiar Paceman, the pickup (which is officially called the Paceman Adventure) has a truncated passenger compartment that ends behind the front seats, with what MINI describes as a 'spacious load bed' behind. Up top is a chunky roof-rack that carries a spare wheel and tyre and the almost inevitable rack of high-intensity spotlights for night-time off-roading.
Off-roading? Yup, the Adventure is powered by the 184hp Cooper S petrol engine and has MINI's ALL4 four-wheel drive system underneath. There's also raised suspension and rugged tyres for really tricky terrain and even a snorkel air intake in case you need to ford a fjord.
Anything else?
MINI says that there are no plans for series production and that the car is a pure one-off. Given that MINI bosses are actually keen to trim an increasingly sprawling MINI range and get rid of some unprofitable models (Coupé and Roadster - we're looking at you) that would seemingly make the chances of production for a Paceman pickup somewhere between slim and bugger-all. Still though, you never know. There may just be enough Texan MINI fans, craving a downsized pickup, to make the numbers add up...