Mini Goodwood gets a $52,000 price tag

It used to be that luxury cars were big. The more luxurious, the bigger. But with premium hatchbacks, buyers have shown that luxury needn't equal size. In fact, many (particularly in Europe) have demonstrated that they're willing to pay a considerable premium to have the luxuries they'd expect from the larger cars they're giving up with the smaller ones they're adopting. The question is, just how much are they willing to pay?

The Toyota iQ, for example, sells for between £9k and £12k in the UK, but the gussied-up Aston Martin Cygnet sells for roughly triple that. The Mini hatchback, meanwhile, ranges from £11,810 (for the bare-bones, 75-horsepower Mini First) to £22,330 for the top-of-the-line JCW in the UK. That's an impressively broad range in its own right, but then you consider that the Goodwood edition goes for a whopping £41,000 – nearly four times as much as the base model.

So what does that amount to in the American market? Well, not quite the $68,000 the straight conversion would come to, but a still princely $52,000, according to reports. Compare that to the $19,400 MSRP for the Cooper hatch that's the base model here (overseas buyers have more spartan models beneath) or the $29,100 which the JCW sells for here, and you're suddenly looking at a whole lot of green for some Rolls-Royce leather and trim.