Mini Maintenance

Sure these new Minis are a BMW product, but their design was inspired by the original British Motor Company’s icon, but I wonder if it has gone too far with the homage, by leaving just a few random electrical gremlins. For the past couple of weeks we have had the little symbol on the left show up in the center of the tach on start up.

There were no other warning lights, it would go off after a couple of seconds and the car ran fine, so we have been ignoring it. From the owners manual:

It took me several times to work my why through the odd procedure to set up my key to unlock both doors with one click without the car stopping me mid key press by shutting off (you have to have the ignition on, but engine not running.) And I never have gotten to the next step after that to activating the daytime running lights. Once or twice since we’ve had it the car seemed slow to crank, but it would always start, so we took it to the local parts store and had them check the battery. It was a little low. We chalked it up Donna only using it to go back and forth to the gym, only about a one mile trip one way, so we’ve been taking it for occasional long drives.

Today, when Donna quickly ran into a store to settle a mis-rung up purchase, I decided to wait in the car with the radio on. After about two minutes I heard a “bong”, the radio shut off and in the place where the car on lift symbol has been showing up a battery one did. This time we took the hint, I read a little on the Mini Forum and headed off to the auto parts store and bought a battery.

Now here is where we stop thinking old Lucas Electric and start thinking new Bosch Electric as the Mini has something called an Intelligent Battery System and you are supposed to register your new battery with your car. If you don’t the car will possibly over-charge the battery because it thinks it is an old and needs more juice, thereby shortening the battery’s life span.

And guess what? It is not something you can do easily yourself. A Mini Dealer (Charleston – 130 miles away) or a BMW Dealer (Augusta – 30 miles away) could do it, for a fee, and I bet it wouldn’t be a small one either. There is an app you can buy called iCarly for nearly $60, so you can do it yourself, but from what I read on the web it will only work with their version of an OBDII adapter which is another $60 or $70. A third option is something called NCS Expert/INPA software which looks cheap (~$15, unless I’m missing something), but it will only run on 32-bit Windows XP, which means buying an old laptop of some kind and a USB- OBDII cable. Plus the coding doesn’t look easy to understand and I’d hate to totally screw something like that up. Time to see if there is a shop in Aiken that can do it.