Back in the 80’s, car companies started fitting their cars with voice synthesizers. I wasn’t born back then but I can only imagine it made travels very long and at the end of them you probably wanted to harm yourself. Mini is trying to revive that.

If you’re still using leg warmers and think “The Safety Dance” is the best thing ever to grace the world, if you dream of extremely puffy hair, excessive hairspray, too much make-up and Prince beating Charlie Murphy in basketball, this Mini product is for you.

For roughly $25,000, Mini will sell you a Mini Cooper with the Camden 50th anniversary package which adds “Mission Control”, among other features. It’s quite a lot worse than it sounds however.

What you get, is an SD car with a few thousand MP3s of various components of the car talking to each other, which are then gloriously delivered to you according to certain circumstances (fuel level, seatbelts off, full throttle and so on and so forth.)

These things died in the late 80’s for two reasons:

1. They broke down all the time

2. No one, let me make that clear, no one, wants their car to whine all the time about how it needs refueling and how you must put your seatbelt on and that the engine is still cold and it’s probably a good idea to not use full throttle.

I see what Mini is trying to do, the whole conversation between bits and pieces of the car to give it more appeal and make it more cutesy and stuff, but it just doesn’t work

Go Mini!! Straight to the dealership to disable that thing. Have a listen in the video below, but don’t tell us we didn’t warn you.

Source: Car and Driver/YouTube via Autoblog