Electrical Failure - Girl in Distress!

[Mini_Bex]

Hi Guys,

I was wondering if any of you have any advice for a girl in distress!!!

I have a Mini Cooper convertible which I bought in September 2010 which I love, however on the drive home last week I noticed that when I sat at traffic lights the automatic start/stop was stopping the car but when I put my foot on the clutch to go again nothing happened and I had to turn the car off and then back on again. Then once I had got onto the motorway the car started 'jerking' forward - it was as if it was getting a split second rush of power and then pulling back again, the rev counter would jump right up and then back down within a second or so as well. It did this about once a minute or so the whole way home.

Once I moved off the motorway it was even worse the slower I got and then eventually it stalled on a main road and I lost all power steering etc. I got it to start again after a few attempts and then it crawled into the next side road where it wouldn't start again.

Mini Roadside Assistance came out and got it to start after diagnostics but towed it into my nearest Mini garage anyway. They had it over a weekend and called me to say that although there was a fault showing in the system they could not find / recreate it and that I had to come pick it up. I fought this and said I wouldn't pick it up until this coming Friday and that they should put some miles on it to recreate the fault rather than me having to do it on my own. However this is Thursday and they still haven't found anything.

It still has 1 year left on warranty and I really don't want to pick up a car that has completely failed and then nothing has been touched on it to fix the problem since. I do a lot of motorway miles on my own and I'm conscious that I could very well be doing 70 on the motorway and if this happens again I have no breaks, no steering, no nothing!!

Do you guys have any advice? Can I call Mini and refuse to pick it up until they investigate further? Should I ask them to extend the warranty on the car? I am 25, and it is my first 'real' car and I feel a bit at a loss!!

Thanks in advance for help

[MrLoz]

I think your Mini dealer needs to recreate the fault by copying the driving distance and or time you did when the fault occurred. It could be heat related. I had a car that started to run really rough during a long motorway journey but was okay on journeys of say 100 miles. Maybe constant motorway speeds causes more heat build up in areas surrounding heat sources like the engine and exhaust.

If you can I would leave it with Mini to sort out. They could leave the car running for half an hour to fully warm up then take it out on dual carriageways to simulate your driving. I had an Audi TT that lit up like a Christmas tree one day, all warning lights on the dashboard were lit and I had no rev counter, speedo, ABS etc. the RAC came out and cleared a CAN bus fault and was 100% okay afterwards with no reactance. The CAN bus is like an electrical road network that joins the cars computers together and the explanation the RAC man gave was that moister might have entered part of the system.

Was it raining when your mini decided to misbehave? Maybe drives through deep or long puddles?


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