Scooter, off-roader or broken steering rack - which makes the best Mini?

WHEN is a Mini not a Mini?

That's the question I've put to myself over the past week after immersing myself in three new variations of the small car, and I'm still not sure if I've found the answer. BMW are banking on stretching their smallest model as far as it can go, but is bigger really better?

First off, the Countryman, which despite having had nine months to get used to the idea is still a stretch too far for MINI (I always cap up the remake, just as BMW still insists we all do). Having now driven it on the best motorways, fast thoroughfares, bendy B roads and knobbly car parks North Yorkshire can throw at it I can tell you that it's a solidly-constructed, quite stylish rival to the likes of Nissan's Quashqai, and despite the addition of four wheel drive feels more handy hatchback than junior off-roader. As much as it annoys me to say it, it's a good car.

But is it a Mini? At more than a metre longer than the 1959 original, not a chance.

Yet while BMW can do bigger, MINI can do smaller, which is exactly what they're toying with by sticking Britain's most famous car badge on a scooter. For the record, I actually think this is an excellent idea, particularly as I always regarded the Mini as a four wheeled graduation from the Mods 'n' Rockers world of the original Vespas and Lambrettas of the Sixties.

If the Countryman is a sop to the miserable modernity of taking Chelsea tractors on the school run, an electrically-powered scooter seems to somehow hark back to the defiant sense of mischief which made the original Mini so much fun. Cool, cheap and clean to run, I reckon this is a much better attempt to expand the MINI brand than a bloated off-roader.

But there's one Mini, new or old, that's always going to be better than any other. Mine.

You probably thought I'd forgotten about the one car that appears alongside every Life On Cars entry, but the truth is that until now it's been sat around on a driveway in Southport, sulking because its steering rack is so broken it actually made the car dangerous to drive. But it's back, and - thanks to spending a weekend with a mechanic friend changing the car's single worst component - it now drives better than I've ever known it.

It still looks tatty but it now drives in a way even a 2010 Countryman can't; it drives like a Mini, which means it flits telepathically from corner to corner the instant you flick the tiny steering wheel. It might be slow, unreliable and not terribly safe, but it's far more fun, cleverly packaged and admired by passers by than a certain car launched by a certain German company in 2001 could ever hope to be. I like the new MINI, in the same way I like the remade Italian Job, an awful lot, but I'll always love the timeless original more.

The honest answer is I don't know when a Mini isn't a Mini. But I definitely know when one is.