MotorMouths

The JCW Coupe is the most entertaining Mini I’ve driven. It’s the type of car that’s sure to get most any driver’s blood flowing, and one Mini you’ll never want unbuckle from.

Love or hate its styling, the 2012 Mini Cooper Coupe John Cooper Works is easily one of the best-performing front-wheel-drive cars we’ve tested. Unfortunately, it’s also priced about $10,000 too high.

Is the Coupe S, which only seats two and offers minimal cargo room, a smart car? Maybe not. Fun? Unquestionably. Sometimes the things that are the most fun in life aren’t always the smartest.

The 2012 Mini John Cooper Works Coupe simply comes up short on value. As much as we grinned behind the wheel when the planets aligned for us on a perfect road, we just can’t find the justification for a Mini made this way.

The purpose of the Coupe, MINI tells us, is to better shape the brand as a whole, increase the emotion associated with it and to project a more manly image. Check, check and check.

It’s hard not to fall in love with the 2012 Mini Coupe. It may be the styling that lures you in, but it’s the pure driving enjoyment that really seals the deal. We’ve never had this much fun getting “Couped-up.”

What Mini has done with the Coupe, is take a car that already was quite talkative, and amped things up to deliver one of the most communicative and affordable cars on the market.

The Coupe is comfortable enough for long hours of driving, and it’s the most viscerally engaging Mini — which is a high bar.

Small but mighty, the Coupe provides a balls to the wall experience in a size not much bigger than a shoebox. It fits oddly into the MINI lineup, but it brings with it genuinely sporting credentials that are hard to discredit.

If you are one of the few people I met that liked the way the Coupé looked, or you just want one of the rarest MINIs around, then the JCW Coupé is for you. Everyone else should stop at the Fiat dealer and check out an Abarth on their way to buy the JCW Cooper hatchback.

Aside from style that’s not to be taken lightly, the Coupe diminishes functionality even though it essentially shares all but one of the dimensions of the four-seat Mini hatchback. But the Coupe is an entertaining place to be when the road gets kinky.

If you don’t dig the way the Mini Coupe drives, you are a bitter and miserable person and I am done with you. As for the exterior styling: I think it just rips—unhinged, subversive, undomesticated, and not at all pretty.