Hiya all, our LY/W 2003 Mini is just on 3 years old, with just over 20,000 miles on it.

Mini have just written giving details of a one year extended warranty for £543. Normally I would bin this and not even consider it, as its extortionate... except.... am I being paranoid about possible CVT failure ?

So, how many of you have extended the warranty ?

Any advice or recommendations ?

I suspect Mini may pay towards repairs if there was a total failure in the 4th year, but you never know.

Cheers

RBW.

This is a difficult one, I extended the warrenty on my previous Cooper CVT just in case of CVT failure. Of course it never happened but I did have over £900 of warrenty work done in the last year (Alternator, Steering Pump, etc). I believe you pay either depreciation or maintenace but in years 4-7 you have the option of extended warrenty , I also believe that my 02 was an early build with a number of inherent faults that had not been designed out luckily the warrenty covered me. My 06 S is "MUCH BETTER BUILD QUALITY" but if I keep it until year 4 then I will extend the warrenty again

Remember about £100 of the cost is the pan European cover so if you make one extended trip abroad or even a few short ones then this alone is worth "its weight in gold".

My opinion for what it's worth is extend and then have a worry free year thrashing the life out of the Transmission, I always enjoyed using Sports Drive for the engine braking safe in the knowledge that if the rubber band snapped it wouldn't be my problem.

MINI may pay towards a damaged Transmission but this is likley to cost around £2500 to replace so it all depends on your confidence factor! I believe with the amount of money we are now spending on new cars a 5 year warrenty should be standard.

I always get extended warranties, 'cause we always put lottsa miles on our cars and keep them forever, or just about. We've used them and they've saved us some serious bucks over the years, so I'd go for it.

BCNU,
Rob in Dago

Thanks for the replies, thats a good point about the Pan European cover, and interesting that you have had a lot of warranty work done My mini.

Couldnt agree more about the 5 year warranty either !

Leaning towards taking the warranty out now....

The issue might be slightly different over here, but for myself I got the extended warranty and it paid for itself by covering brake work that would have come too late for the standard warranty.

I am running without warranty on my 02 CVT with 26,000 miles on it....touching wood as I type. ;-) It's got a full mini service history, and I think the 500 odd quid is too expensive. I am considering taking out a warranty with another company, I haven't read the small print but the gold cover which covers transmission failure and completion of work at a mini dealership with http://www.warrantydirect.co.uk/ costs about 22 quid a month.