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It's rare to see a MINI with a AGM battery, the vast majority of them have a flooded battery. There are typically 2 different sizes of them, if you going to put a larger battery (CCA) than what are from the factory then your going to want it registered to the car so it charges at the correct amount or it won't last.
You only need to register the battery if your car has IBS (Intelligent Battery Sensor).
You can tell if your car has IBS by looking at the negative battery cable, if it has a box on it like in the picture, it has IBS.
Thank you everyone for the helpful posts. Mine just has a regular negative battery cable, no Box on it at all just a plane black cable. I put a battery tender on while swamping out old battery and have swapped in a 760CCA AGM battery. The car so far seems to not know the difference (why would it?) So far so good, new battery seems to help a lot when starting when really cold at night, old one looked like it had been there for many years.
Last edited by Wanderlustsrt; 01-27-2017 at 09:22 AM.
Whats really funny is I use the identical battery for my Grand Cherokee. So one vehicle with a 1.6L and another with a 6.4L and same size make and model of battery.
Depending on the day of the week your MINI was made I've seen either one come in different MINIs. So my general rule is to put the same kind of battery back in. But if we do want to change you need to make sure the shop you have can reprogram the DME correctly as the programming is different for AGM and not. It's very important to have the batter registered to the car as it will get overcharged if it isn't and burn out sooner.
Actually even without the IBS sensor you still program the DME for a new battery.
How do You know this? Everything I've read says that if there is no IBS module on the negative battery terminal then there is no need to register the battery.
So I decided to do some testing after getting back home from the auto show in philly (130 miles from me), right after home I tested the battery and it was 12.55 volts with car off, after restarting it ran 14.25 volts with car running. Seems to work fine after driving 260 miles or so.