So, I didn't think much about it when I got the Convertible Sidewalk Edition last week, but my car has manual climate control. After a couple days I started looking more into this. How does a $41,000 special edition NOT have automatic climate control. On the MiniUSA site under the special edition page, it does say it comes with automatic climate:



I then sent an email to my salesman and the sales manager of the dealership. I was told by the manager that the ACC is NOT an option on the Sidewalk Edition. A couple hours later, I get a call from the General Manager. He apologized and said he was glad I brought this to their attention. But he said they should have caught this before delivery and told me before I came in. After speaking to their factory rep, they were told that some of the Sidewalks were made with the manual climate by accident and they weren't caught and made it through to the dealers. He said I could return the car if I wanted or the factory will give me back $500. We didn't think it was necessary to return the car as we love it! So we will be getting back a check and he was very apologetic.

 

Wow, talk about a snafu!! I had a similar weird thing happen with my 2019 F57 that I custom ordered. There was a parts shortage on the assembly line, so it was produced without the adaptive cruise control and ancillary functions. There’s an actual credit “option” on the window sticker from the factory of something like $800.

 

I mean, its good that Mini is offering credits for missing features, but, I think I'd rather have the feature? If I ordered auto climate control, I'd like to have auto climate control. Same with the cruise control function...

 

I would have definitely preferred the auto climate control. In a car that cost $40,000, that should be in there no matter what. Manual shouldn't even be an option. But, on the other side, we can live without it and we love everything else about the Sidewalk edition - the color, the anthracite gray seats with the matching piping, the roof design, etc. I didn't feel it was worth turning in the car (unless he had another Sidewalk sitting there on the lot). The GM told me that they have a shortage of cars coming in and the Oxford plant was closed for a couple of days because of that chip shortage.

 

Don't get me wrong, its a beautiful car! And, if you love it, that's all that matters

 

Thats exactly how I felt about my car. I was upset it didn’t have things that I spec’d, and the dealer was very willing to do everything they could to
get me another as quickly as possible, but ultimately I decided it wasn’t worth it to get a different car.

 

Totally sucks but after mine got totaled 2 weeks ago I put a deposit on this that was non refundable an the car is wrong so I’m trying to get it fixed as they said another one is 3 months away if want it correct.

 

IMHO, that really means that the "accident" was that Sidewalks were defined to have manual climate control, until someone realized that this is wrong. The guy/gal on the assembly doesn't simply pick the wrong part (they should be staged in the same order as the vehicles coming down the line).

MINI can't simply swap out the center stack control module, and do some coding?

 

no they can’t. Apparently it would be prohibitively expensive. I tried everything. In the end I got a convertible jcw from another dealer yesterday as a result