Go read Part 1 and Part 2 and come back, I’ll wait.
When I got off that phone call with CarMax on Saturday, I posted a question on the Mini forum to see if anyone had any ideas or had seen this “no high beam shutoff” issue before. I got a quick reply that it sounded like it was the switch assembly because the ‘flash to pass’ function didn’t work either. They had looked it up somewhere and it is a $700 part.
So, when Monday rolled around, before I called the CarMax service department, I called the shop in Medford, John’s Auto Care Center, and get their opinion. Once again, they passed me along to Dean. He didn’t tell me to run away from this one too, but said that I should bring the car over so he could hook it up to their diagnostic machine to read the codes, if any, and check that the right sequence of events occurs on the CAN (Controller Area Network) bus. We scheduled an appointment for Friday the following week.
On that Friday we got up, had breakfast and drove over the Cascades to Medford. After a quick stop at our favorite bagel place, we made it to John’s. In an effort to ingratiate us to the staff Donna had baked some chocolate chip cookies the night before and we gave them a couple dozen of them when we checked in. After maybe 15 minutes of chilling in the waiting room, the friendly voice on the phone, Dean in the flesh, came in and said, “Follow me.” So I did. We walked out to where the car was and he got in the drivers seat, while I plopped down into the passenger spot. He had his big ol’ tablet plugged into the OBDII port.
I then got a brief synopsis on how the high beam system works. Back in the day when you turn the high beams on or off you’d push or pull the stalk and that would activate a relay that switched voltage between a couple of wires. But now in the modern world pushing (or pulling) on the stalk sends a signal to the main ECU which then passes it to the two headlight modules who in turn signal the LEDs to change state. Looking at the tablet we could see confirmation that the main ECU got our request for the high beams to come on and then on the next screen we could see the headlight module getting our request and the high beams would come on. Pulling back on the stalk, the ECU never got a signal. Dean agreed that the combination switch was more than likely the culprit.
We walked back inside and he looked up how much the Kombi Switch would be and whoever it was on the Mini forum was dead on, its actual cost is $704.68, which they have to order from Mini of Portland. Because it was late in the day Dean said, “Let me work this up and I’ll email you the repair quote. “You’ll probably get it before you get home.” Total for the part, labor, programming the car to talk to the new switch and miscellaneous shop supplies came to a grand total of $1,092.33.
When I called the CarMax service guy on Monday to see if they had a problem with that number and they said, “Nope, go ahead. Just make sure the repair shop have no issue with taking a credit card payment over the phone.” When I hung up I called John’s back and was told that was AOK with them and they would order the part. Now we wait.