What Did You Call Your MINI?

by Steve Baker.

On Dec 28th 2003, I noticed that the MINI-USA's owner's directory was close the 4500 person mark. The owner's directory contains not just the name of the owner - but also what they named their MINI. Suprisingly, 77% of owners had given their MINI a name (up from 74% in July and 71% in April).

So, after a lot of counting and editing, I ended up with the following list:

The 10 Most Common MINI Names:

33 MINI's are called: Mini Me
27 MINI's are called: Nigel
27 MINI's are called: Winston
12 MINI's are called: Daisy
12 MINI's are called: Coop
12 MINI's are called: Alice
10 MINI's are called: Stella
10 MINI's are called: Spike
10 MINI's are called: Pepper
10 MINI's are called: Minnie
10 MINI's are called: Max

The following names were also popular:

There are 9 of each of: Winnie, Scooter, Oliver, Jack, Emma and Chili
There are 8 of each of: WinnieCooper, MiniMouse, Lucy, Lola and Gary
There are 7 of each of: Stitch, Miles, Maggie and Fiona.
There are 6 of each of: Ziggy, Pepe, MrsPeel, MiniMine, Maxine, Marvin, Goldie and Baby.
There are 5 of each of: TheCoop, Sunshine, SilverBullet, Scout, Molly, Mimi, MeMini, Kermit, Happy, Daphne, Charlie, Bridget and Betsy

There are thousands of unique names - many are very clever - many are just plain silly. Nearly every cult British TV show or movie has one or more MINI's named after it's characters!

This is not a science:

I arbitarily decided not to count purely descriptive names like 'MINI' (36 cars), 'The Car' (4), 'Cooper' (9) and cars named after their colour ('Red' (12), 'Blue' (7), 'Silver' (4), etc).

I suspect that some MINI's have two or more family members subscribed to the Owner's registry - so there may be just one 'Stealth MINI' - but with two owners.

All the others are more or less unique (although sometimes they are just mis-spelled - and there is a lot of difficulty in finding those).

Should I count 'Winnie' and 'Winnie Cooper' as the same name? Am I wrong to ignore 'Red' - but allow 'Little Red'? Should I count 'Lil Red' and 'Little Red' as the same name? Is 'Chili' a colour because the official MINI Red is called Chili Red? Decisions, decisions!

Now, for the benefit those two people who called their MINI's "Herbie". Here is an easy guide:

'Yoda' - small, green, deceptively powerful.

'Herbie' - The Love Bug?...Well...I guess.