Today was my first day of cardio rehab, which is basically where I have to get up ungodly early, go to a hospital-run gym, and do exercise things while wearing a few sensors seemingly designed to rip as much chest hair off as possible when you remove them. This is all because my aorta exploded late last year, you see.
Anyway, on the way back home, I was at a stoplight behind a second-gen Mini Clubman when I noticed something about the car that was, um, unsettling. One of those things you see and you can immediately think of like 30 people who will absolutely hate knowing it exists. I’m talking about the Clubman’s badge placement at the rear.
Here’s the thing about the Mini Clubman – and I should mention I’m talking about the modern, BMW-built Clubman that is sort of the Mini version of a wagon, but not named like the original Mini version of a wagon, the Traveler, and not the original British Leyland facelifted Mini Clubman; here, this should help:
Now, in all versions of Mini-based wagons, you’ll note that instead of a liftgate or hatch, there’s a pair of side-hinged doors. It’s a great and distinctive detail, and is part of the charm of the car; I’m very pleased BMW kept this design on the modern versions of the Clubman. From the rear, the central split makes the Clubman a very symmetry-focused car, which is why I find the badging decision so baffling.
The way Mini badges the Clubman is via the old classy-car trope of individual chrome letters with very generous kerning, or letter spacing, for an effect that looks like C L U B M A N. Those of you good at math may have noted that there are seven letters in clubman, an odd number. This means unless you want to split the “B” in half, you’re going to be in a situation where you have four letters on one side of the central door-split, and three on the other if you try to place this badge centrally.
If there was no central split in the rear, this would be easy; you’d just make sure the B was on the centerline, and there were three letters on either side of it. But you can’t do that with the central door gap, so we end up with this:
The green boxes show the distance between the outer letters and the edge of the taillights, and, as you can see, the left is much closer than the right. The badge is off-center, shifted closer to the left edge.
I just can’t understand why this was considered okay? I mean, it’s not the biggest deal, but if you have a car with a literal line running down the center of it, why would you choose to attempt a center-mounted badge setup on your car that is inherently incapable of being centered?
Humans are really, even strangely good at visually finding the center of things, and many people feel genuinely unsettled when something is just off-center enough to be barely noticed. It’s uncomfortable, and almost worse if it’s subtle, like in the case of the Clubman.
Plus, it’s an un-forced error; they could have stuck a smaller Clubman badge on one of the sides. That Mini badge on the left would have been a good candidate to be split down the middle and stuck in the center, and a Clubman badge could have taken its place.
As it stands, it just looks wrong. This was a baffling decision! I’ve met car designers, they’re incredibly fussy people, very aware of How Things Look and How They Should Look and they’re always all about concepts like how They’re Not Going To Be Seen With You Unless You Change That Awful Shirt and that sort of thing. This badging deliberate sloppiness just seems completely antithetical to them.
The problem isn’t the asymmetry; asymmetry is fine if you intend it. But in this case, it’s clear that they wanted it to be centered, and couldn’t do it. And didn’t have the dignity to just admit it and move on.
Ugh. Why? Does this bother anyone else? Am I just being a jerkhole?
Why not swap the badging so it says CLUBMAN on the right and then you can evenly split C O O P E R
It just occurred to me that a great April Fools joke you can play on a C O O P E R owner is to replace the C with a P…
As soon as I saw the headline, I knew this was gonna be it. Drives me nuts!
Good news, I already hate the Mini Clubman’s pointless tailgate design, so this is just confirming it. Truly the epitome of style over substance, there’s absolutely no reason to have barn doors on a car that small.
I actually know a number of people who like the barn door design, and all of them are tall.
Stooping under a tailgate on a small car kind of sucks. Also it’s a useful design if you put long objects on top of your car. I have trouble opening the liftgate on certain cars when I have say, kayaks on top.
Symmetry is overrated
Overrated is symmetry
Did you not notice that the digital pod that replaced the regular instruments over the steering wheel is not centered but to the left of the steering wheel? Try overlooking that on 2018 plus minis!
I’m far more annoyed with the brake lights on this gen Clubman
I prefer Clubman Pinaud Bay Rum Aftershave
*splash*
First thing I saw when I saw that car. Baffling. But I’d fix it by rearranging to read B U M | C A N.
Plus it would then be a Christmas car, because it has no L.
They did make a Noel Edition 2020 JCW BUMCAN: it came in a very festive Green&Red paint job, they just forgot to remove the L.
https://cdn.bmwblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020-MINI-JCW-Clubman-ALL4-TEST-DRIVE-39.jpg
I need a way to post an image.
I would have to debadge it, drives me nuts.
Just add an extra N at the end… Clubmann… which fits since it’s owned by a the Germans and it would give you the symmetry you desire.
there’s nothing wrong with that.
The badge tells you that the car is driven by a :
1) British Lord going to his club ( thus the Club Man )
2) a modern caveman that can go berserk at any time and attack you with a club ( thus the Club Man )
Both are not incompatible and it’s possible that the British Lord ends up attacking you like a caveman, but with a golf club.
If they had barn doors on their SUV it’d become the Count Ryman, the vampire who haunts the Grand Ole Opry.
Still better than the Mini Klugman.
I noticed it and it never bothered me.
I’d noticed the asymmetry, but not the spacing difference, until this article. I agree it’s very off-putting. It reminds me of when the sound from a video is one frame off of sync, and I get very distracted by trying to decide if the video is out of sync, or if it’s just my imagination..
Should be rebalanced and split to CLUE3MAN.
Apropos of the Clubman’s splitting words, a lot of police departments would have the word ‘POLICE’ in large letters on the side of their vehicles so that when a door was opened, depending on one’s point of view, the only letters visible would be either ‘PO’ or ‘LICE’ which is amusing, depending on one’s point of view (ha, yeah, the same phrase with a different meaning.) My hometown’s police department used to do that but recently changed their livery so that on some vehicles ‘POLICE’ would split into ‘POL’ and ‘ICE’ (not that some police officers would mind the association with the I.C.E.) and on some other vehicles the entire word would be on a single door. Now that I think about it, it’s actually been a while since I’ve seen any police vehicles with the split between PO and LICE in the course of my various road trips though I didn’t ever actively keep an eye out for the graphic design of LEO livery per se. So I do wonder if police departments have become more conscious, in light of the ACAB movement, so to speak, about their PR, their qualified immunity and impunity notwithstanding.
I’ve owned a classic Clubman Estate, and I currently own an ’09 Clubman S and I have to say I don’t really care where they put the stinkin badges, but I do NOT like the center split doors……the bar in the middle is a PITA, and to put almost anything in the back you have to open both doors. I would much rather have a single panel door, whether it opens vertically (my preference) or to one side (as some aftermarket doors for the classic Clubman did). The other problem is how much that bar in the middle impacts your rear vision.
There’s a reason why the Corvette only had a split rear window for one model year.
My ’02 Yukon has barn doors and I can confirm that split is annoying
but according to the commentariat the barn doors are the best thing since sliced bread. I get annoyed when someone is on the center of the backseat rendering he rearview mirror useless
. . . or, just embrace the asymmetry, and put the whole word “CLUBMAN” on one door . . . this isn’t a pickup truck with a tailgate!
Speaking of details that infuriate, the 6 spoke Subaru wheels with 5 lugs cause me pain every time I see them
It’s not just Subaru.
It bothers me every time there is a mismatch between lugs and spokes.
It’s especially bad if one is an even number and the other is odd, or both odd but not the same.
The big decider for me with this is whether there’s a design elements seperating the hub from the spokes, in the most general form it’s a concave circle around the hub, which splits the association between spokes and studs.
There are a lot of 2010s-ish wheels that just ignore this entirely, including your example and that’s what makes it look so goddamn horrid. They’re just stuck there, right through an otherwise uniform designs.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS6roOJTtkRsgU4Qmk0bzd6dr7LmqpeIlez4g&usqp=CAU
Oh god. That picture. (×_×)
The idiots should have studied history more carefully and named it Traveler, which has 8 letters
BTW, I feel your pain about sticky sensors, a stroke in February netted me 4 full sets of EKG stickers and not one set of steak knives.
C L U B | M A N !
Fixed it, four characters on each door.
I was always more concerned with the fact it looked fucking crosseyed from the back.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that of several options suggested this one offended people the least.
My bet is this now going to get changed for the next model year. Designers are also sensitive folks and I assume someone is going to get all butt hurt about this article. it certainly is an unforced error.
This kind of shit drives me nuts, and it bothers me every time I see a Clubman. However – if you take the rear badging scheme as a whole, it looks a little bit more balanced. The “CLUB” part on the left side of the break is paired with the small Mini logo, and the “MAN” on the other side of the break is paired with the larger Cooper S badge. The non-centeredness of the CLUBMAN logo is still bothersome, but taken as a whole, it doesn’t look as unbalanced.