Road Test Shootout: Mini Roadster vs. Abarth 500C vs. VW Golf Cabriolet

Ray Leathern gathered three soft top convertibles last spring to find out which one was best. He’s been biding his time ever since, for a sunny day to bring you the result.

Murphy has a way of getting involved in such matters. Three soft top convertibles are all huddled together for warmth on a hill in the Western Cape. Before them, the Swartland Valley with its wiggling roads and ripe farmlands, stretches out like a latticed playground. Now the challenge lies in finding what exact part of that valley doesn’t have an over achieving cloud hanging above it, emptying itself of all of its precipitous contents.

Finally, “sun ahoy on the starboard side”, in the direction of Philadelphia. A hue of colour pecks its way through the murk. It’s time to get this ragtop show rolling; roofs down, heaters on. If the British can do it, and they are the biggest buyers of convertibles in the world, we can too.

In pole position for our ragtop test is the punchy Mini Roadster. You can think of it as a two-seater version of the Mini Convertible with a more rakish A-pillar and rear seat space that’s been subsumed into its big 240-litre boot. Then we have the fighty Abarth 500C, which of course, because it’s an Abarth, you don’t actually call a Fiat at all, nor does it say Fiat anywhere on its wide bottomed body. Finally, if only to add a bit of sensibility to the trio, we have the Volkswagen Golf Cabriolet.

Eye of the beholder
In the exterior looks department each has its own appeal. The Golf, with its classy ‘Shark Fin Blue’ paint work and LED day time running lights, cuts a figure of sensibility against the other two. Its longer wheelbase accommodates the longest soft top too, so the A-pillar is quite low, giving it a classic, long-bodied convertible look with the roof down. There are no ugly roll-over hoops behind the headrests to disturb that clean, rearward running line like you’ll find on the Audi A3 Convertible. I expected the Golf to look positively geriatric in this company, but it doesn’t, surprisingly.

The Abarth 500C looks like a strong lathering of marmite across the Fiat 500’s normally, cutesy white bread exterior; and that’s marmite as in you either love it or loathe it. The normal Fiat 500C can make a person sick with its chic, hipster appeal, but I feel my bones loving the transformation that the Abarth body kit brings to the finished product with its front and rear brake cooling ducts, bigger wheels and emotive badging. The bunny chow roof with the A-B-C pillars still in place may only just qualify it as a convertible, but it’s a neat nod to the old Fiat 500C and it allows the Abarth the advantage of behaving like a conventional hatchback some of the time, but more about that later.

The Mini Roadster must be hankering after a role in the next Michael Bay, Transformers blockbuster with its self-confident attitude. This shameless self-promoter takes the cake when it comes to visual drama; using a small, low to the ground, strong looking tub from which the whole car sort of muscles out of. The black headlight casings, fog lights, bonnet scoop and racing stripes down the middle, leave the two-seater Mini looking exactly as it should: like a Camden punk sporting a red Mohawk and an unsavoury lifestyle. For all the Abarth’s heightened appeal over a regular 500C, it is the Mini Roadster that undoubtedly turns the most heads and does the best job of embracing and impressing with its compact, two-seater layout.

It’s not on top, its inside
With roofs that expose the interior so readily, each of these look-at-me mobiles needs to come up with the goods when skulkers come peering into the cabin. The Abarth is all about its chunky leather seats and an even chunkier steering wheel, whose thumb grips look like the pincers of the Abarth scorpion. The roof’s interior finish is good and when it’s closed you’d be hard pressed to think you were even in a convertible. Three needles demand focal attention from the driver’s seat. They are the central rev counter, whose needle chases the speedometer as it whirs up and down, and the massive turbo boost dial with a buzzing change-up light in the middle. That turbo gauge alone is worth the price of admission and provides hours of entertainment. Ergonomically, however, the Abarth is flawed. The seating position feels preposterously upright and trying to access the pedals feels like it requires an Oscar Winning re-enactment of Daniel Day Lewis in ‘My Left Foot.’

The Mini Roadster is quite the opposite in this regard, it’s as low as the Abarth is tall and the whole car feels immediately graspable when your hands meet the steering wheel. All Minis do this, they send a stimulus climbing through the driver’s seat, straight up the base of the spine, down to the foot on the throttle, as well as out to the palms on the steering wheel. It’s fantastic, but it’s the build quality that leaves a lot to be desired. Plastics that are a bit too shiny and hard to the touch, along with a creaking cabin, puts you in mind of what it would be like in an eighteenth century Spanish Galleon.

The rear view mirror moves around like Apollo 13 on re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere too and then we get to the manual roof that you twist and throw back over your head. My first impression is that it provides a cool, DIY, hands-on experience, however, the inside of the roof shows exposed beams and hinges, which is at odds to the otherwise funky Mini cabin. We’re assured the next one coming out of Oxford will have an automatic roof, but I hope the quality of the roof itself is also improved.

The Golf Cabriolet is the sanest and most inviting cabin here, after climbing out of the other two. A conventional Golf instrument binnacle and fascia greets the driver and can’t help but make you feel at home. All of the Volkswagen trim is molded securely into place so the ambiance is relaxing and comfortable. The roof is equally faultless in its quality and quietness. You could say it’s trying the least, but probably achieving the most out of the three. The Golf comfortably takes the cake for interior quality.

Born to be wild
Both the Abarth 500C and the John Cooper Works Mini Roadster carry with them sporting names chock full of racing pedigree, however, far better engineered R8 Spyders and Aston Martin Volantes even lose their impetus to be out and out sports cars when the roof goes. How about these ones?

Let’s take a look at the numbers: The Mini Roadster John Cooper Works should cake walk this with 155 kW and 280 Nm from its 1.6-litre twin-scroll turbocharged engine. The Abarth 500C by comparison only makes 99 kW and 206 Nm from its 1.4-litre turbocharged ‘T-Jet’, but it’s a fraction lighter than the Mini and has a 5-speed manual gearbox to maximise its ratios over the Mini’s six. The 1.4-litre TSI in the Golf is mated to a smooth, 7-speed DSG and brings just 90 kW and 200 Nm to the party, (although you can have a 118 kW version), but that heavy 2+2 body definitely rules it out in this sprint to the line.

The figures say 6.5 seconds (Mini), 7.9 seconds (Abarth) and 10.5 seconds (Volkswagen), for each vehicle to complete the benchmark 0 – 100 km/h sprint. In the real world though, brace yourself for an upset, because the Mini only just pipes the eager Abarth by a whisker in my testing to 100 km/h. Not believing what we saw we re-staged and the same outcome resulted.

How the Abarth, which is down by a third on power, can be so fast can be explained with two possibilities. Either the cheeky Italians are lying and it’s got more power than they are telling us, or (and this is the far more realistic explanation) the Abarth is able to put its more manageable power down off the line and use its taller ratios through first and second gear. By the time the Mini got some traction and got into the teeth of third gear, it left the Abarth behind, but it didn’t half make a meal of getting there.

155 kW is arguably too much for the Mini’s front end to handle, when not allied to a traction control system that isn’t fully switched off in DTC Sport Mode. The Abarth’s gutsy attitude comes to life when Sport mode is activated on the dash. The steering becomes extra heavy, the throttle picks up from anywhere in the rev range and the boost gauge jumps to attention. The exhaust note sounds like a tin of wasps fizzing to get free and sting everything in sight; it is totally intoxicating.

Of course it can’t keep up with the low, wide, Mini around the bends. It makes quite a meal of tight corners because of its tall centre of gravity and lack of traction on the inside wheel, but it isn’t half bad on a longer radius bend where the tight steering keeps the fast Abarth flying, all be it with some extra bravery on the part of the driver.

The Mini is plagued by a bizarre dichotomy when it’s going fast. The whole appeal of Minis is chassis rigidity; go-kart like handling and lighting fast turn in. The 17-inch front tyres provide mountains of front grip, so the Roadster can slew into corners with gay abandon, but the low profile front rubber that gives you that aggressive grip is always grappling over road imperfections, sending the Roadster this way and that, and unsettling the handling. The car never feels as if it calms down around you. It’s a stimulating, but tiring drive.

The Roadster has been reinforced to make up for its lack of rigidity sans roof, but that just seems to amplify the judders. You can get away with such firmness in a stiff hardtop, but with no rigidity, these intrusions need to travel somewhere, and that somewhere is inevitably the driver. On anything less than billiard smooth roads the Mini just goes to pieces and you find yourself backing off the pace because you just don’t have the connection to the road or the car. The Golf Cabriolet, again, never promised razor sharp performance or handling, and true to form it doesn’t provide much to make you want to set your alarm early and go for a sunrise drive. You’d be surprised however, at the precise steering performance and how good the body control is.

The Golf is of course an Audi A3 Convertible in casual clothes and the Audi can handle as much as 155 kW in some iterations, so with Volkswagen’s detuned power unit and exemplary ride quality, good responses are well within the Golf’s capabilities. On a back road blast through the Swartland countryside, the Golf was keeping pace with the bouncing duo purely by keeping things simple and sticking to the road calmly.

Crucially, the Golf doesn’t behave as untoward as the Mini, but then it also doesn’t have the exuberance of the Abarth. No one is ever going to drive the Golf like they’ve just stolen it I know, but it’s good to see that beneath the sensibility it can do a fair job of keeping pace with the louder cars. There is no clear winner in the performance stakes other than the Mini Roadster being the biggest let down of the three. The Golf surprised more than expected with some extra agility, but I’d say the Abarth deserves kudos for providing uncomplicated driving fun, albeit without much finesse or speed.

Final verdict
Do soft top convertibles like these, with their inevitable lack of rigidity, really deserve their racy badging? I think we can vote out the Mini Roadster John Cooper Works right here. A less powerful Cooper S or Cooper may have provided more pleasant-ness, but for the asking price, the top dog Mini barely out accelerates a significantly cheaper Abarth and it falls down in the build quality stakes. Most disappointingly however, it doesn’t provide the quintessential stiff handling a hardtop Mini can provide. Then we have the Volkswagen Golf Cabriolet which looks good, is well priced, outperforms expectations and ticks all the boxes for everyday usability, but for all its competence it inevitably lacks some fun factor and head turning credentials.

That just leaves us with the Abarth 500C. It’s the cheapest of the three, it will be the rarest of the three and the Abarth kit completely transforms it from a regular Fiat 500C. For me, it is a fully realised concept that has the perfect amount of power for its admittedly flawed chassis, but is still deserving of its Abarth, go-fast badging. It turns into a proper, fun hatchback when you slide the roof closed and it performs with a rare twinkle in its eye no matter the situation. With the Mini out of the running, the Volkswagen Golf Cabriolet is undoubtedly the more sensible choice, but for that exact reason I find myself drawn to the Abarth 500C.

Photo Credit: Leon Oosthuizen at LeonsLens

You can watch the video of this road test on YouTube.

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