i was cruising on the highway yesterday going 60 and the RPM would jump to 4000 rpm and then slowly drop to 3000 and then jump to 4000 again for about 20 minutes. Then later in a parking lot i turned on my car and went to accelerate and my foot was on the floor and the car would only go 1 mile an hour, an hour later everything was running fine and there were no problems. My car just hit 42k miles, does this mean my transmission may be dying?

 

Ive heard cases of r50s with auto trans going bad from 50 - 60k seems to be somewhat of a common thing. I would give a call to the dealer see if they have any advise on the matter. Even if youre out of warranty they might be able to shed some light on the situation. I remember when i was trying to find a MINI I ran into someones story of their trans seeming to explode while they were on an onramp. Whether these are connected I doubt it but I do know the 1st get CVT is notorious for going out very early.

 

Unfortunately, this might be the beginning of the end. I had a 2006 R50 with the CVT that gave us all sorts of trouble. Take it to your dealer and get the tranny fluid flushed out. That got us a bit more life out of ours. Also, check and see if they can update the ECU. I read somewhere that there was a minor update to the ECU that fixed some minor CVT problems.

Other than that, though, there isn't much you can do. BMW chose a poor-quality part that had a really bad run. Ours died closer to 94k, but started to get really bad around 60-70k.

Personally, if I were in that situation again, I'd look to selling the Mini or trading it in before the transmission gets much worse. We sold ours after the transmission had seized up almost completely (it only lasted about 5-10 miles before it'd completely shut down), and were only able to fetch $3k for it. Granted ours wasn't in the best condition.

Manuals seem to be the way to go with the Mini's, although, the CVT was discontinued after the 2006 models. 2007 and beyond, even the autos, use a 6-speed automatic transmission instead.

Hope this helps. If there's anything I can do, let me know!

 

idk this is really hard because its my first car, and i take great care of it. and with just over 42k and its already slipping and such its really annoying. i really dont want to sell it, but i guess id rather do that than have it die on me and itll be worth half what i paid for it

 

because i bought it preowned from the dealership in feb 2010, and it has less than 50,000 miles, do you think itll be covered under warranty?

 

4 yr or 50k miles You are probably out by date depending on when the car was put in service by the original owner.

You could try to get an extended warranty that will cover the CVT should it fail and they will take care of it, but the CVT will eventually let you down, sorry.