Exclusive: I Drove the Only MINI Paceman Adventure Pickup Truck in the World

Last year I wrote about the MINI Beachcomber concept, that roofless, doorless idea of what a MINI could be if the brand let its imagination run loose. I said then that MINI has always been at its best when it stops trying to be sensible. The Paceman Adventure makes exactly the same argument — except it does it with a pickup bed, a snorkel, and four-wheel drive. And somehow, somewhere along the way, MINI Classic and BMW Sweden arranged for me to drive it on a frozen lake in Sweden.

There is only one of these in the world. Let that sit for a second.

What Is It, Exactly?

The MINI Paceman Adventure started life as a standard MINI Cooper S Paceman ALL4 — the slightly wider, slightly taller, slightly more grown-up MINI that came with all-wheel drive. BMW apprentices and instructors at the company’s plants in Munich and Dingolfing cut off the rear end, stripped out the back bench, and turned the whole thing into a two-seater pickup truck.

They gave it exclusive Jungle Green Metallic paint, matte and gloss-black accents, a modified chassis with significantly extended ground clearance and steeper approach and departure ramp angles, proper off-road tires with deep chunky treads, a snorkel air intake at roofline level so it could tackle water crossings, a roof rack loaded with auxiliary forward lighting, and a small trailer hitch at the back.

Under the hood sits the same turbocharged 1.6-liter four-cylinder as the Cooper S Paceman it was built from, making 184 horsepower and channeled through MINI’s ALL4 all-wheel-drive system. The gearbox is a six-speed manual. No paddles, no DCT, no automatic mode. You shift it yourself, three pedals, the way the original Mini always was.

It is completely insane. It is completely correct.

The Design Does Something to You

I have looked at pictures of this car probably a hundred times since it first appeared in 2014, and I figured by now I’d be over it. Standing next to it in the cold Swedish air, I was not over it. There is something about a pickup truck that appeals to a lot of MINI, and why not, BMW enthusiasts.

The short overhangs are still there, that classic MINI DNA, but now there’s this purposeful bed sitting behind a tiny two-person cabin, with a snorkel poking up alongside the A-pillar and off-road tires pushing out past the arches. It looks like something a kid drew when asked what a MINI should look like for an adventure.

The Jungle Green paint doesn’t hurt. In the flat northern light, with snow on the ground, it looked like something out of a rally stage from the 1960s. It has this scrappy confidence that most cars couldn’t carry off. Because it is a MINI, it works completely.

A Small, But Intimate Interior

The cabin is tiny. Obviously. You know it’s going to be small before you open the door, and it’s still smaller than you expect. With the rear seats gone, it’s just you and one passenger, and the car wraps around you like a helmet. The steering wheel is close. The windows are close.

In a cold Swedish winter, that is not a bad thing. I felt sealed in, which made the whole experience on the lake feel more visceral, not less. The interior is noisy. Wind noise, tire noise, road noise — it all comes through with very little filtration. On a smooth frozen lake it was manageable. On anything rough, you’d be shouting over it. For this car, in this context, that worked. It felt raw in the way older cars feel raw, like the machinery is part of the conversation rather than something to be apologized for.

On the Ice

BMW Sweden and MINI Classic arranged a full session on a frozen lake, which is the kind of opportunity you don’t walk away from. Even if it means changing three planes to get to Northern Europe. Ice driving has a particular quality where all the physical feedback is amplified. Grip comes and goes in a way that feels almost liquid. You feel the front end searching, feel the rear moving before the numbers would ever tell you it was moving. In a rear-wheel-drive car on ice, you’re always managing a slide. In the Paceman Adventure, with ALL4 and 184 horsepower through a manual gearbox, you were choosing when to invoke the slide and how far to take it.

The steering is genuinely good. I didn’t expect that to be the thing I kept coming back to, but it was. There’s real feedback through the wheel — not a lot of weight, because the car is light, but genuine communication about what the front tires are doing. On ice, that matters more than it does anywhere else. You’re reading the car through your hands as much as through your eyes.

The manual gearbox makes everything better. There is something cool about holding a gear through a drift, downshifting when you want traction rather than power — all of it adds a layer of involvement that a paddleshift transmission cannot replicate. This car was always meant to be manual. It would be a different, lesser experience with anything else.

I drifted it. A lot. The ALL4 system isn’t a traditional locking differential setup, so you can’t just pitch it sideways and hold it there indefinitely the way you might with a purpose-built drift car, but with the right entry speed, slight braking and enough throttle through the corner, the rear would swing wide and the car would hold a satisfying arc. Because it’s light — genuinely light for something with raised suspension and off-road hardware — it changes direction quickly when you need it to. There’s no mass to fight against. You ask, it responds.

There was one moment, late in the session, where I came into a wide left-hander too fast, the rear went further than I wanted, and I had about half a second to decide whether to feed in opposite lock or lift and hope. I fed in the lock. The car came back. I was grinning like an idiot, even though I was terrified because the MINI Classic folks warned me to bring it back in one piece.

Why MINI Needs This Car

Or something like it.

MINI has spent the last decade growing in every direction. Hatchbacks, convertibles, crossovers, electrics. They’re all good cars. None of them, outside of the JCW variants, has the kind of personality that makes you want to tell someone about it at dinner.

The Paceman Adventure has that personality. So did the Beachcomber. The original Mini had it by accident, and the modern MINI has been chasing it ever since, sometimes getting close, often not. What the Paceman Adventure shows is that the formula isn’t mysterious. Make something small and purposeful and a little bit strange, give it a manual gearbox, and don’t overthink the rest.

I’m not saying MINI needs to build a pickup truck. But someone in that room in Munich in 2014 looked at the Paceman, took off the rear roof, added a snorkel and some chunky tires, and produced something that a decade later I’m still thinking about after driving. That instinct — build the weird thing, see if it works — is what the brand needs more of. Not a production pickup. Just more willingness to build the thing that shouldn’t work but does.

One of One

There are no production plans for this car. MINI has been clear on that, even more recently. With MINI moving deeper into electrification, a 1.6 turbocharged manual pickup truck with a snorkel isn’t where the brand’s energy is going. But maybe it should be since the car world is making a U-turn towards combustion engines again.

And this MINI idea exists. It works. On a frozen lake in Sweden, it was better than I expected it to be, which is saying something because I went in wanting it to be good and half-expecting to be let down. I wasn’t.

Thank you to MINI Classic and BMW Sweden for setting this up. And to whoever it was in that Munich training facility in 2014 who looked at a Paceman and thought “what if we cut off the back and put a bed on it” — you were right. You just weren’t right at the right time.

[Photos provided by BMW Classic / MINI Classic @davidpentek]