We were out and about today and in our travels ended up behind what appeared to be a new MINI Countrymen. The compact British car line was founded in the late 1960s and is now owned by German automaker BMW. I was born in 1968 in Canada so the brand never really entered my consciousness until I watched “Auston Powers in Goldmember”, the third film in the James Bond spoof series starring Canadian actor and Saturday Night Live alum, Mike Myers. That was around the same time BMW released the current iterations of the iconic British car into the wild. A history of the MINI used in the movie can be found here.

As we were pulling up to an intersection behind this new MINI something just didn’t look right. When I finally spotted it, I said to my wife, “Who designed that?”. Don’t get me wrong it not going to cause an accident and there won’t be a recall anytime soon but what exactly were the designers at MINI thinking. Naturally, I had a blog idea so we followed the vehicle long enough to capture the video for this post.

See if you can spot the design fail and let me know in the comments below. Would love to hear of other design flaws or features you’ve seen or heard of on other products too. If you post design fail content of your own please link back to this post for everyone to see and tag it #gbfail.

The only other failure that comes to mind was more of a marketing faux pas than bad design. As the story goes, when GMC released the sixth generation Chevy Nova (the 1980s subcompact not the muscle car from previous decades) to the Mexican market sales were dismal. Sales had been good in other markets but nobody could understand why the affordably priced Nova was not selling in Spanish speaking markets. Turns out “no va” closely translates to “it doesn’t go” or “not going” in Spanish. Would you spend money on a car that didn’t go?

Click here if you are interested in a brief history of the Chevy Nova. No mention of the naming faux pas of course.

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