My wife's 07 R56 is still running on its original battery, so we had it replaced at Inskip MINI over the weekend. After the car is programmed and ready to go, we used the NAV to go home. Everything seems to work fine, but the position of the car was slightly off compared to the actual road. At first, I thought nothing of it because I assumed we’re on a new road. However, as we are continuing to drive farther, the position was way off... At one point, the NAV says our position was in a pond.

We immediately bought the car back to the dealers and they tried reprogramming the car. It didn’t work. They were able to find a fault code with the NAV. Geoff, the service manager went out of his way to take care of us. He gave a coupe loaner and promise to fix it.

We got the call on Monday saying everything was fixed. It turns out the NAV antenna was faulty. Geoff took care of it and we didn’t have to pay anything. He also had someone drop our car off at my wife’s work so we didn’t have to drive down to dealers to pick it up. (I dont think MINI of Peabody would do that for us.)

Back to the topic...how would changing out a battery messed up the NAV antenna? We were lucky that the dealers was super awesome, but this could’ve cost us $$$. Has anyone else have this issue?

 

Why was battery replaced? Age or did it go dead?
Antenna may have been source of battery failure, although if it was original battery it was probably due to be replaced anyway.
Glad to here of MINI dealers going above and beyond the call of duty to satisfy the MINI family.

 

We replaced the battery because of its age. We didnt want it to die on us this winter...

 

I would think that it was more of a coincidence.

 

The NAV antenna has a Radio ON line to it and it is possible that when they changed they voltage spiked the car and the antenna took the brunt of it and failed.

 

Possible, but doubtful to be honest. There are quite a few other circuits between the antenna and battery that would have probably been damaged before an antenna. That being said, if the antenna was weak in the first place, there is a possibility that a small spike could have killed it.