Mini Beachcomber stalled due to pesky safety regulations?

If you were hoping to be able to take to the sand in the production version of the Mini Beachcomber sometime soon, we may have some bad news for you. According to the minds at Autocar, the open-air Mini may have encountered some fatal trouble when it came to getting by crash standards. The report says that in order for the Beachcomber to get past government regulators, the company would have been forced to incorporate additional side bracing to protect occupants in the event of a collision. According to the UK, the decision makers at Mini have determined that doing so would have compromised the vehicle's styling too much to be worth it.

As you may recall, the Beachcomber was intended to be a modern interpretation of the old Mini Moke, a funky looking machine that seemed more at home on a golf course than a highway. Based on the Countryman architecture, the Beachcomber would have been a less hardcore alternative to the famously doorless Jeep Wrangler. Whether or not Mini finds a way to skirt these crash regulations remains to be seen, but we wouldn't be surprised if this particular concept is banished to realm of never-produced.

[Source: Autocar]