This idea came from Andy Hindley in Twickenham, who recently looked at a modern Mini, looked at an old Mini, and reasonably concluded that somebody, somewhere, has completely lost the plot.

Because there is now quite literally nothing mini about a Mini.

The original was a shoebox on wheels. Today’s version is roughly three times the size, with the turning circle of an aircraft carrier but the boot space of a backpack.

And it’s not just the Mini.

Cars everywhere have ballooned — swelling, bulging, expanding — while the rest of the world (notably parking spaces) shrinks like a wool jumper in a hot wash.

So why are cars so bloody enormous in 2025?

1. Safety. Allegedly.

Manufacturers claim bigger equals safer.

Perhaps — for the people inside the rolling fortress.

For everyone else — pedestrians, cyclists, lampposts, postmen, small ornamental hedges — these things are roaming, high-bonneted intimidation machines.

We’ve created vehicles so tall you could film a David Attenborough documentary from the driver’s seat.

2. Sustainability? Absolutely not.

We’re now sold the idea of “eco-friendly SUVs.”

This should be linguistic contraband.

Yes, electric drivetrains are cleaner in use.

But sustainability is about using less, not constructing a battery-powered penthouse suite for someone whose longest journey is the school run.

Which brings us neatly to…

3. The absurdity of local life

Have you seen the school run in any suburb from Twickenham to Tunbridge Wells?

Convoys of vast SUVs — cars designed for deserts, mountain passes, and minor military operations — all travelling 0.8 miles to drop one child at school.

A parade of parents piloting vehicles wider than a small London road, all doing journeys that could be done in:

• a small car,

• a bike,

• or frankly, a light jog.

It’s like using a sledgehammer to crack a pistachio.

4. Meanwhile, parking spaces are getting smaller

This is the true comedy of modern motoring.

Cars are getting bigger.

Parking bays are getting smaller.

And supermarkets expect you to interpret white lines as… a suggestion?

We now have the great national pastime of watching someone attempt to reverse a giant SUV into a space designed in 1990, when most cars were essentially wheeled Tupperware.

5. Necessary? Don’t be daft.

Do you need a seven-seat thunderbus to travel half a mile to Pilates?

Do you need a bonnet so high you can’t see toddlers, bollards, or entire hatchbacks in front of you?

Do you need a vehicle wider than the country lanes you insist on driving down?

No.

You need a car that fits your street, your life, and ideally the parking space outside Waitrose.

So here’s a thought: tax them more.

Not out of spite. Out of logic.

If your car weighs more than a medium-sized elephant, it should pay for the damage it does.

If it can’t fit within two lines in a car park without diagonal experimentation, you’re in premium territory.

If the headlights sit at a height that fries the retinas of anyone in front of you, that’s a luxury surcharge.

We don’t need bigger.

We need sensible.

Small cars weren’t a quaint relic — they were a brilliant idea.

Turning them into oversized lifestyle accessories is, without question, one of the worst ideas ever.

Comedy Disclaimer

For legal, emotional and neighbourhood-WhatsApp-group harmony:

It’s not just the Mini. Other formerly-small cars are available — sadly, most now roughly the size of modest holiday rentals. Any resemblance between this article and your own driveway is purely coincidental, although if you’re currently trying to park something enormous in a very small space… well, you know exactly what we mean.

Call To Action

Got a local school-run monster clogging up your street?

Driving something labelled “compact” that could comfortably host a dinner party?

Send pics. Name the culprits. Join the debate.

Let’s catalogue the Worst Ideas Ever — one oversized “small” car at a time.

There are two kinds of morning people. The ones who leap out of bed like a Labrador spotting bacon. And the rest of us, who would happily trade our passwords for a cup of tea that appears by magic. Enter the Goblin Teasmade, a bedside contraption that promised fresh tea the second you opened your eyes. In practice, it mostly delivered warm chaos and a sticky nightstand.

“Ultimately it was easier to get off one’s arse in the morning and make a drink rather than fiddle about the night before including loading the milk.”

What it was trying to be

A Teasmade is a bedside tea robot with a clock. You set the alarm, it heats the water, sends it into a waiting teapot, and theoretically wakes you with the gentle sound of British optimism. These machines were a staple in the UK for decades and hit peak popularity in the 60s and 70s. Think of it as the spiritual ancestor of “smart home” touting convenience without the app-induced despair.

The origin story, with extra steam

Early tea makers existed in the Victorian era, but the Goblin era kicked off once electricity took over. Engineer W. H. Brenner Thornton’s 1932 design was picked up and marketed as the first Goblin Teasmade, produced by the British Vacuum Cleaner and Engineering Company. The idea was brilliant on paper: bedside kettle, timed heating, water pushed into a pot, and the power cut once brewing finished. A tiny domestic orchestra, powered by steam and hope.

The ritual nobody asked for

The marketing fantasy: you drift off, the clock does its thing, you wake to a perfect brew and soft lamplight. The reality: a nightly preflight checklist that would make Heathrow blush.

• Fill the kettle to the line, not a millimetre more, unless you enjoy tea-flavoured duvet.

• Dose tea leaves so they don’t sit stewing for eight hours and turn into tannin soup.

• Position the spout tube like a sniper.

• Set the alarm, and then set a second alarm in case the first one only makes tea and not noise.

• Load the milk. Which means leaving dairy on your bedside table until sunrise. Because nothing says “good morning” like room temperature dairy and a gamble.

By the time you’ve faffed with that, you could have gone to the kitchen, boiled a kettle, and had a victory biscuit.

The engineering was clever. The user experience was chaos.

I’ll give the Goblin this: the mechanism was neat. When the water boiled, steam pressure forced it into the teapot, and a spring-loaded setup cut power once the transfer finished. There were models with trays, lamps, and plastic that looked like it wanted to be art deco when it grew up. But the product asked you to baby a system that reciprocated with spills, clogs, and alarms that sometimes chose vibes over volume. The UX wasn’t “tap to brew.” It was “become your own butler and also your own electrician.”

Britain loved it anyway

For a while, the Teasmade was everywhere. Then the country collectively remembered how kitchens work. The Goblin brand itself changed hands, and the Teasmade name ended up with Swan. Retro lovers still buy new versions, proudly made far from Leatherhead, because nostalgia is undefeated and bedside tea remains an unbeatable pitch.

Why it flopped in the real world

• Tea is unforgiving. Leave leaves sitting for hours and you get the taste of a school corridor after double maths.

• Milk is not a nightshift employee.

• Bedside electronics plus half-asleep humans is a risky combo. One wrong elbow and you’re marinating a paperback in PG Tips.

• The payoff curve is upside down. All the effort is at night, when you’re knackered. The “reward” shows up in the morning, when you could just walk 12 steps to the kettle.

Verdict

The Goblin Teasmade is a perfect museum piece: ingenious, charming, and slightly cursed. It promised effortless mornings, then handed you a homework assignment before bed. The Britishness of it all is flawless. We built a contraption to save a 90-second walk to the kitchen, then decided the contraption was too much bother and went to the kitchen anyway.

If you own one now, you’re not wrong. You’re just performing a beautiful ritual for an audience of one. For everyone else, the original review still stands: it’s easier to get up and make the tea.

This month, we will be writing on the Travel Kettle with Car Cigarette Lighter Adapter submitted by

Some inventions are so gloriously pointless you wonder whether they were designed as satire. Exhibit A: the travel kettle with a car cigarette lighter adapter. On paper, it sounds genius. You’re on the road, craving a brew, and voilà, plug in your trusty little kettle, and five minutes later you’ve got boiling water.

The Reality

Except not. The “five minutes” bit is a bold-faced lie. The car kettle is powered by the same cigarette lighter socket that once struggled to keep your Nokia 3310 alive after Snake marathons. Now it’s somehow expected to summon the energy of a small power station to boil half a litre of water. That’s like asking your office Wi-Fi to stream Netflix in 4K while you’re on a Zoom call with 37 open tabs, theoretically possible, practically laughable.

Actual test results show it takes around 45 minutes to reach a rolling boil. Yes, 45 minutes, long enough to finish a true-crime podcast, miss your motorway exit, and seriously question your life choices. That’s assuming your car battery doesn’t give up halfway, because leaving it running too long basically turns your engine into a £500 kettle stand. And when the tea is finally “ready,” chances are you’ll already be at your destination or stranded on the hard shoulder, calling the AA to explain that you broke down chasing a lukewarm Earl Grey.

It gets worse.

These kettles are marketed as safety devices, “Never go without a hot drink on a long journey!” But stopping at literally any petrol station, services, or lay-by café will get you faster, cheaper, and definitely hotter tea. The car kettle is less a gadget and more an endurance trial: “How badly do you want this lukewarm coffee?”

Because pointless tech has consequences. It adds to the mountain of e-waste, clutters cupboards, and embodies the worst kind of design thinking: inventing a solution to a problem that never existed. Nobody in the history of motoring has said, “If only I could spend an hour boiling water in the glove compartment.”

The Tech Ledger verdict?

Utterly useless. Not just bad tech, but actively misleading tech. If you’re after portable boiling water, stick with a flask. Or better yet, embrace the radical notion of stopping at a café. Your sanity, your car battery, and the planet will thank you.

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Bad Ideas Club is all about: collecting the funniest, strangest, and most useless tech ideas people have seen (or survived).

💡 You can submit yours anonymously or share it openly in the comment section.
🏆 At the end of each month, we’ll pick the “winner” and publish a feature on it — with credit if you’re up for the fame.

Because sometimes, the bad tech says more about the industry than the good stuff.

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