The verdict: The 2025 Mini John Cooper Works Countryman stands out with loads of style and flair on the inside — plus a roomier interior than before — but in terms of being a performance SUV, it doesn’t seal the deal.
Versus the competition: While other small luxury hatchbacks and SUVs are monochrome and drab, the JCW Countryman separates itself with an explosion of color and personality.
There’s nothing miniature about the 2025 Mini John Cooper Works Countryman’s size, power or price, but at an as-tested price of $52,000, does it deliver your money’s worth? I spent a week driving a JCW, which is the top performance-oriented trim level of the redesigned Countryman SUV, and while you do get a lot more than you might think, it’s not exactly where you’d expect it.
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More Room Than You Think
The Countryman is the largest Mini, and it’s redesigned for 2025 with more space on the inside. Overall, the Countryman isn’t very mini at all. It’s about the size of an Audi Q3 or BMW X1, which is the Countryman’s corporate cousin upon which it’s based. Among non-luxury models, the Honda HR-V and Toyota Corolla Cross are similar in size to the Countryman.
There’s more room in the new Countryman than there used to be, and my 6-foot-tall frame was comfortable both up front and in back, though the backseat doesn’t leave much room to spare. There’s also decent cargo room (for a Mini) behind the backseat, with a Cars.com-measured 16.8 cubic feet of space. That’s similar to a 2025 Subaru Forester (16.5 cubic feet) or Kia EV6 (17.7 cubic feet). The Mini has a tall cargo area, though it’s relatively shallow, and there’s a good chunk of storage space under the cargo floor.
The Countryman is also perfectly passable if you have kids who are already out of rear-facing car seats. My two kids — who ride in a booster and a forward-facing convertible seat — fit well enough for quick rides, but driver and front-passenger room is compromised if you put a rear-facing car seat in the back. As a family car, the Countryman makes sense for limited use; it would make a good second car to complement a larger family vehicle, good for taking on shorter trips.
Related: 2025 Mini Countryman John Cooper Works: Gas Isn’t Dead Yet
More Power Than You Think
The JCW’s turbocharged four-cylinder is a spunky engine that can deliver a surprising burst of power when all 312 horsepower kick in. A horsepower rating of 312 looks like a lot on paper, and it is, but torque is down more than 30 pounds-feet versus the Countryman’s predecessor. Mini says the JCW Countryman can accelerate from 0-60 mph in 5.2 seconds, and we matched that in our measured acceleration testing while using launch control.
Unfortunately, 5.2 seconds is slower than the previous generation’s claimed 4.9-second 0-60 time. While the difference likely isn’t perceivable via the seat of your pants, it’s another knock against this car’s acceleration — and the JCW Countryman is poky from a stop. You can mash the accelerator pedal, but the new seven-speed dual-clutch transmission is slow to get the Countryman moving with any vigor. The engine moans as it’s revved, but there’s not much forward movement; acceleration delay is noticeable when you’re trying to get away from a stoplight or into traffic. The fastest way to get up to speed is to engage launch control, but that’s not a practical solution in most circumstances. The transmission is a beast otherwise, though, with fast, hard, wide-open-throttle shifts that punch you back into your seat. There’s also a Boost mode, but it doesn’t provide any extra power; Boost mode simply turns up all the JCW’s drive mode settings to max sportiness for 10 seconds.
Then there’s this vehicle’s handling, which is a signature experience of any Mini. The JCW Countryman has an adaptive suspension with adjustable-firmness shock absorbers, and it’s set to the max in the Go Kart driving mode. That said, the presence of a Go Kart mode offends me, because Go Kart should be the standard experience in a Mini. The JCW’s Go Kart mode isn’t even dialed up all the way; you have to select Sport Plus instead of Sport in the mode’s submenus and accept more lenient stability control programming before you get the signature handling you’d expect from a top-performance Mini.
Minis have traditionally been fun to drive no matter the driving mode, but in anything other than Go Kart mode, the JCW feels a bit bland and soft; it’s not until you whip it into a corner that it demonstrates its proficiency. A lack of steering feedback — even in Go Kart mode — hurts this vehicle’s fun-to-drive factor, which is not how it was in the previous Countryman, where you’d feel engaged with the car even when tooling around town. The JCW Countryman is otherwise comfortable to drive on smooth suburban roads — it gets choppy and brittle on rough city streets — but a level of sharpness and engagement is missing from this top performance trim.
One highlight, however, is the optional JCW performance brakes, which stop this car so quickly they’ll rip the eyeballs right out of your head when you slam on the brakes. Seriously, I haven’t slowed down this quickly in a long time. The braking performance could challenge many proper sports cars, though with the JCW not showing much proficiency as a track car, I question the necessity of performance brakes.
More Tech Than You Think
There are different kinds of fun apart from driving engagement, however, and the JCW Countryman’s interior styling and technology are certainly entertaining. There’s fun styling, including a fabric dashboard with red accent patterns, a racy steering wheel and very rewarding physical switches, including a toggle switch for the gear selector and key turn switch for the engine start (like the good old days, even if there isn’t a physical key to insert).
The attention-grabber of the interior, though, is the dashboard’s circular screen, which features vibrant and fun graphics, though arranging everything into a circle makes for a bit of an unusual user experience. Apple CarPlay, for instance, displays in a square format on the circular screen.
There’s so much information displayed on the circular screen that it’s overwhelming to use, even after a week behind the wheel. Too much is being asked of this screen, which has to display driving data, such as the speedometer and gas gauge (there’s no instrument panel in front of the driver, just a head-up display, climate controls (there are no physical climate controls, either) and the traditional things you’d find on a center touchscreen, like phone mirroring, media and navigation.
Because of this, the standard HUD is a lifesaver. Otherwise, everything has to fit into the big flashy circle; unlike a Tesla, the speedometer isn’t located at a glancing distance. The HUD is super interesting, featuring animated graphics and semi-autonomous driving information, as well as engine speed and fuel level info. There’s also a shift light when you’re driving in manual mode, but there’s no gear indicator, which is a strange omission for a performance model. I want to see which gear I’m in.
Available driver-assist tech includes hands-free driving up to 37 mph and automatic lane changes. That comes via Active Driving Assistant Pro, which comes with a Comfort Package Max. An interior camera in the Iconic trim level can be used for selfie photos or videos, or to monitor the interior of the car through Mini’s mobile app when you’re away from the vehicle. Other unexpected features include a heated steering wheel, augmented-reality navigation and active driver’s seat side bolsters that inflate depending on drive mode.
More Expensive Than You Think
Yes, the JCW Countryman surprises in a lot of ways, and that includes its price. The car we drove rang in at an as-tested $51,995 with optional equipment. What else could you get for $52,000? Honestly, it’s hard to ignore electric vehicles like a Tesla Model 3 or Model Y or a Kia EV6, which will match or exceed the acceleration of a Mini JCW — and the Teslas have the engaging handling and steering feel that’s missing from the JCW Countryman. On the gasoline side, you’re square into Volkswagen Golf R territory.
At this price, the Mini doesn’t immediately come to mind as a good choice for a performance SUV/hatchback, but there are a lot of likable qualities in the redesigned Countryman that could make it a fun alternative in the luxury subcompact SUV class. (The base Countryman now starts at around $40,000.) In the JCW Countryman, it will likely be the car’s interior experience and technology that sway you into the Mini camp, not its handling and acceleration, which isn’t dedicated enough for a top-performance JCW Countryman.
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