• Customize Your Car Online: Intro and Conclusions

On this page:

• Mini
• DaimlerChrysler's Smart Cars

Virtual US home of the new Mini.

http://www.mini.com acts as the worldwide portal. Unusually (?), the US specific website is given a domain name marking it out as being specific to the US. Compare this with the fact that for a very long time, US websites were the only ones not tagged by a country code (cf. .co.uk ; .fr ; .de etc.)

Customization Stages

The website uses a rather nifty interactive Flash video to help you customize your new Mini before ordering it. The annoying thing about Flash, of course, is that it is very difficult to cut and paste text from lists into these pages (should anyone know differently, please let me know). Anyway, there are 5 main stages, each being broken down into further sub-stages.

1. Color Schemes
2. Packages: Premium, Sports, Cold Weather, Convenience
3. Performance
4. Cockpit
5. Accessories

Here's the "Austin Powers" model that I made:

And some details of the technology and interior:

Here's a printable PDF file from the website, detailing the full list of features: mini_full_features.pdf

I'll post a list of relevant mobile media, later.

DaimlerChrysler's European small car.

http://www.smart.com is the global portal for this model, with links to local webpages. This model isn't available in the US, yet (the webpages promise the car sometime in the future).

There are three basic models -- two-seater, four-seater, and coupe:

I think that I'll resist the temptation to get something sporty, this time, and try to be a little more sensible: the four-person car.

Picking this model leads you onto the various options pages:

Notice the navigation bar on the left, in the topmost of these three screen grabs (difficult to capture a scrolling screen!). Although one can have quite a lot of fun playing with the 3D rotational views and the choice of colors ...

... (here, I went with a nice black "tridion" and blue body), the other items in the menu merely list features that come with a particular model. There are a host of accesories to add to your car -- many of the ones that turn up on the Mini website have equivalents here -- but on consideration, the process of building your car isn't as well integrated as on the Mini pages.

Still, more lively than most of the pages, I've seen so far.

Oh, and there's even a special edition that comes integrated with an i-pod: smart i-move.