MINI Cooper vs Hyundai Veloster

The Mini Cooper is redesigned for 2025 with a host of alterations throughout. It’s a little bigger inside and out, while sporting all-new infotainment tech and quirky interior design to help maintain the badge’s fun personality. It still weighs less than 3,000 pounds, too, and when combined with a potent turbocharged four-cylinder in the Cooper S, that makes for some truly hilarious fun-to-drive attitude.

Verdict: Although substantially larger than the original BMW Mini that reached America’s shores in 2002, and no longer offering a manual transmission as standard, the new Mini Cooper continues to be a stylish and fun-to-drive way of getting around, and will even return solid overall fuel economy in the process.

Consider Hyundai and its growth in popularity over the last decade. The brand built its relevance with practical, sensible vehicles, like the Sonata, and SUVs like the Santa Fe and Tucson. But “fortune favors the bold,” or so the saying goes. There is something to be said for taking an unlikely risk.

In the 2011 model year, Hyundai released the Veloster, going in a completely different direction than the rest of its typically safe product lineup. Hyundai already had a hatchback, the Accent (and later the Elantra GT). But the Veloster was something completely different. It featured a unique hatchback-meets-coupe shape and an even more unique 3-door layout. The result was a sporty daily driver that’s both fun and functional, and it has been completely redesigned for the 2019 model year.