When Austin/Morris launched the Mini in 1959, other car manufacturers couldn’t believe the ingenious packaging of Alex Issigonis’ masterpiece.

They also couldn’t believe how Austin/Morris were building it for a profit, and thus Ford bought one to take apart to see how they had done it.

What they found was definitely ingenious packaging, but also that the Austin/Morris profit was literally unbelievable, in that they, well… weren’t making any.

The British car industry was a weird place.

Austin/Morris corrected this rather crucial issue with a price rise (not that their incompetence would disappear of course, causing the companies to do so themselves eventually), and the Mini became one of the best selling small cars of all time, along with becoming a design icon.

If you fancy taking a classic Mini apart yourself as Ford did you can now give it a go, thanks to Pixeljunkie‘s ‘exploded’ Mini Cooper, instructions for which are available so you can explode your own!

There’s more to see at Pixel’s photostream, take a look via the link above, whilst we rue not titling this post something along these lines…