A few weeks ago I noticed that Donna was walking with a slight limb. We got an appointment with her foot doctor and he diagnosed it as a “drop foot”. He recommended getting a brace and set us up with a place in town to get fitted for one. When she asked what causes drop foot, he passed a referral on to a neurologist. Met with Dr. Neuro and he tested her with some electrodes and the left leg was noticeably weaker. The nerves that that control this run down each leg and exit the spine between a couple of vertebrae. This usually is accompanied by pain, but she has none, so they scheduled an MRI.
Well, the MRI did show some slight bulging in the disc that is in the right spot, but the neurologist thought it really wasn’t bad enough to cause the problem. He said he’d have a spine specialist he knew take a look. We haven’t heard back from him yet. This weakness also makes it so she can no longer operate the clutch in the Mini which is a fairly heavy clutch for such a small car. So we started looking for a Mini with an automatic transmission.
Couple of Sundays ago we found a 2016 Cooper S at the local Ford dealer. On Monday we went down to test drive it but they couldn’t find the keys. The salesman said it was possibly already sold because it was parked far away from the rest of the used cars. His manager was in a meeting so he couldn’t ask. We looked around the lot and found the only other car on the lot that was possibly small enough to fit on the short side of our garage, a 2020 Honda Fit. We took it for a test drive and it wasn’t a bad car but it lacks any character and is too long to fit on that short side of the garage. When we returned the Fit the manager was still in the meeting, so the salesman said he would find out about the Mini and call us, so we exchanged phone numbers.
Naturally he never called. Nor did we hear from him on Tuesday morning, So I called. They couldn’t find the salesman, but the woman who answered the phone said she’d find out about the Mini and call me right back. She didn’t. After lunch we just drove back down to the dealer and this time our salesman was magically there. The story on the Mini was that it had something wrong with the radio and they were waiting on a part. We asked to test drive it anyway so we could see if we even liked the car or not. We did like it (not really fond of the green with white roof combo though) but what about the radio? The screen of the “radio” was stuck and the only thing you got out of the speakers was AM static. But the radio is also your interface for setup of what your key does, your tire pressure, oil level, setup your Bluetooth, etc. Their answer was we’ll give you $1,000 off the $20k. I said I’ll go home and check out some forums and see about a possible aftermarket solution.
Poked around in a couple of Mini forums and found out that replacing the radio with an aftermarket unit was a dicey play at best, so I decided they would have to fix it before buying. The next day Donna asked me to call the shop over in Medford that we have had Mini fixes from in the past to ask their opinion. I was connected with a very nice guy who took 5 or so minutes explaining how the system worked and letting me know it would be a couple grand at minimum to fix this. His advice was to walk away and never buy a Mini with existing electrical problems. Called the Ford dealer and said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”