My 16-yo granddaughter is taking driving lessons and we decided to get a car for her as incentive to do well in high school and get into college. I also want to use this car as a life lesson and also to teach her to not be incompetent when it comes to cars. We'll see how that goes. 🤞

After trolling the AutoTrader and such, we found a 2014 MINI Countryman Cooper S with high miles and in my budget. Carfax looked OK and it was never in an accident ... but it has 135k miles. It is in pretty good shape, and it is clear that the previous owner had taken care of it. It faintly reminded me of the first car I was able to use - my Mom's Mini 850 (British Leyland) about 50 years ago. Of course that was nothing like this car ... 😏

I know the best places to for useful information (might not be the fastest) is the forums, and as a last resort Facebook (faster turnaround but mostly keyboard farts). I must say this is the weirdest car I have ever experienced, and I suppose that gives it "character". Also weirdly, my wife loves it (for now) but we'll have to see what granddaughter thinks of it tomorrow (Christmas Day).

So, my joining the forum is to get insights where the manual cannot help. One such issue is the lack of horn honk when locking the doors, even though the manual suggests that this is possible. I had a quick read of these subforums before posting this and apparently, it's a "thing", i.e. it is not available after all. (Things like this give me my user name ... &#128530

Anyway, hoping to learn about this car from these fora.