Mini

Not the same company as the badge suggests. The car launched in August 1959 as the Austin Seven and the Morris Mini-Minor, under the British Motor Corporation; “Mini” was what everyone called it long before it was anything you could buy; BMC only made Mini a marque in its own right in 1969.^[1] Ownership moved with the industry around it: BMC into British Leyland in 1968, British Leyland into the Rover Group in 1986. When BMW sold most of Rover Group in 2000, it kept the Mini name and used it for an entirely new, German-built car; this entry is the original, 1959–2000 one, badge-engineered under three owners and sold for most of its life as someone else’s car before it was its own.