I was driving to the store literally 2 miles from my house and was changing into 3rd gear when all of a sudden my engine goes *SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE* all my "idiot" lights (ie oil, battery, CEL, service engine soon) came on and my engine died. I pulled into a school parking lot and waited 1 1/2 hours for MINI road side assistance to come pick my broken ass car up in 30º weather. Also before the tow truck got there all the electrical stuff stopped working too. I tried to re-start it and it did nothing, not even a click.
My car has 16k miles on it BTW.
And I just got home...it's 10:30 and my fingers are numb.
Also, by chance I had my car scheduled for service to have my transmission looked at on Monday because it was making a knocking/rattling noise at idle. So, not only is the tranny making funny noises, the rest of the car decides to crap out on me.
To be honest I saw this coming a long time ago. This will make it about the 10th time my cars been in the shop in a year and a half. Weeee MINI ownership!
-Jason
2002 Dark Silver Cooper S w/ white roof. SOLD
Last edited by LuckyRVA; Dec 7th, 2003 at 04:04 AM.
After doing a little searching around here...I've found some people who have had similar experiences and it looks like my supercharger may have seized up. I guess I'll see for sure on Monday.
Sorry. Take some consolation that complete and total failures like this are real easy to diagnose and mostly easy to fix. I'd rather have something clear cut like this than a niggling problem that is intermittent or that you have to go to the mat with the dealer to acknowledge needs fixing.
Unfortunately we've seen a couple of cases here where people fit new pulleys, and then the engine throws the belt. Unfortunately, the water pump is also on this belt, so in a matter of moments, the engine seizes.
In one recent case here, they denied warranty because of the aftermarket pulley. In another case where they was no aftermarket pulley involved, they shouted the owner a new engine.
Apparently, as part of the jcw kit they put on a new water pump with reduced gearing to counter this problem. They don't talk about it, but they do
Good call Swamos, thats why JCW is fully warrantied, and aftermarket or solo attempts are not, the JCW effort has been tested in all climates with BMW assistance, whereas many of the others just have not got the resources to do this, eventually learning will develop and be posted here, so that changing a pulley, also involves the following mods, water pump upgrade, etc, etc.....
Hope this all gets sorted without too much expense
Yes, good luck, although if the the failure was pulley-related, I would be surprised if they covered it. I view pulley replacement with no other mods as making a simple tradeoff in reliabilty for more performance and I don't think people pay enough attention to the downside. And I wonder sometimes if the poor overall reliability we see in the car may, at least in part, be due to the car and its owners being a mix that results in a lot of tinkering.
In last nights temps you probably could have driven quite a while before overheating. Unless you were doing highway cruising or pushing it a bit. If the SC siezed then the belt wouls have burnt badly. Make sure they replace it.
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My Cooper S broke down tonight... 
