Do yourself a favor and check your Cooper S BATTERY BOX.

Mine Had 2 inches of water in it.
My motoring bud had an inch in his.

This could get UGLY if not taken care of ...

Does anyone know the purpose of the openning on the rear bumper? See the pictures..

It is for the tow hook. There should also be in in the front(lower grill).

so if my MINI needs to be towed away, a towing hook would be used? Then why is it so much of the center?

The hook is in your tool kit (I believe) and screws into that hole.

Here's one I discovered at the Dragon this weekend (and forgive me if it's already been mentioned): the "European" parking light. Engage the turn signal stalk when getting out of the car, and the front parking light and rear running light on that side of the car will stay on until the stalk's returned to center. Nice for making your MINI seen when parked on a dark street. I'm told it's designed to be left on all night like that, but I do wonder how long it'll last before the battery goes flat...

Vittaly- I actually saw this being done at my MINI dealer when I picked up my car. It didn't seem to matter that the hook was off-center. The little red MINI came rolling right out of it's space! Not something you wanna see when you're picking up your brand new pride-and-joy... !!

my car got towed once and i suggested using the tow hook. i just got laughed at and the tower said it would just rip off the bumper...

Most definately not true, it screws directly into the frame. I actually had use out of mine on another MINI to load it into a trailer with a flat tire. no damage from the hook. And when at a race track you are strongly recommended to run two.

Oh that's just the kind of ignorance you love to hear from the guy who's about to tow off your beloved MINI.

I haven't seen this posted yet, and I don't remember reading this in the manual. If you leave the air circulation control in the "closed" position (no outside air, or closed vents) when you turn off the ignition, the car apparently opens the vents (you can hear the motor doing this), then when you turn on the ignition the next time, the vents are closed by the motor automatically.

I can't think of a rationale for this feature, maybe its a safety thing so that if you leave a pet or your kids in the car they would not suffocate.

THAT'S what that noise is! I never could figure it out! Maybe it'll help get that icky Krystal Hamburger smell out of my car. (Not the first thing you want to smell in the morning.) You're right- that's not in the manual and it hasn't been posted here yet. Thanks for posting that!

What do you mean that "icky" Krystal hamburger smell? Maybe you should've gotten chili cheese pups.

Parcel Shelf........ The Sequel

Found another great spot to stuff the parcel shelf, if you are carrying rear passenger(s), and:

- Have a small dog and don't want to "enclose" him/her
- Would like the rear passengers (kids :impatient) to have access to the boot while driving
- Have something tall to carry (ummm.... make that thin and tall )

To keep the shelf in place, you'll want "lean" the shelf slightly forward by pushing the bottom back toward the hatch and leaning the top forward towards the front of the car so that the two pivot pegs hold the shelf from falling foward/down. The shelf will be nearly flush/parallel to the hatch when closed so it wastes little space, and it's rock solid for attacking the twisties . It actually looks like it was made to fit there (did I miss something in the manual ).

Aside from the security benefit of always having the parcel shelf on hand, for our dog, it also acts a "gate" so he can't jump out right away when we open the hatch, or risk getting his tail clipped when we close the hatch.

Snapper.....interesting....I tried that and on mine, the parcel shelf is not prevented from being pushed outward if the dog decided to try to jump out of the boot while the hatch door is opened....but if you put the bottom of the parcel shelf all the way down so it rests on the floor of the boot so the shelf is exactly vertical, it fits securely

also,my parcel shelf does not have the perforations/screen in it... I never noticed that some parcel shelves have the perforations/screen in them...I assume the S has that for some reason?....mine is not an S....but I felt the bottom of my parcel shelf and there are the perforations in it although it is covered by the black felt on mine so they must use the same base for the 2 diff models of parcel shelf

Are these hooks used for loading the car on a flatbed or holding it down in transit or both? In another thread somewhere regarding the very famous Batmini which had recently had trouble and needed towing, the owner spoke of the idiot flatbed driver who didn't secure the car down and it rolled while in transit and smashed the front end on the back of the truck cab.

I have heard more than one horror story about car movers who haven't a clue how to care for the cars under their trust - and I get afraid that even calling the national MINI help number will flush out some of these idiots. For example, many still use chains to secure MINIs while the safe and sane method is with nylon webbing around the tires.

Bill

Umberto,

Yes I agree, with the hatch open, it's more of a psychological barrier than a real one. However, my shelf has (stock) rubber bumpers stapled into it midway below two pivot pegs in pix.... they seem to help "jam" the shelf in place pretty well so that it would require a decent shove to knock over.

I much prefer the shelf in this position rather than vertical, all the way to the floor, as you describe, for the following reasons:
- It uses zero boot floor space... I have a dog crate that just barely fits width of the boot floor and I keep my wheel jack/air compressor/tire repair stuff pushed against other side of the boot in the stock jack location.
- When not using the crate, my dog will stand-up, resting his front paws on the shelf to look out the back window. The pivot pegs keep the shelf from falling over.
- It seems harder to dislodge or fall over from hard braking, hard corning and bumpy roads (w/o dog, of course )

I don't have any good observations that haven't been observed by the legions or reported clearly enough in the manual, but I will say that recently I was enjoying the fact that while the MCS doesn't have the auto-up feature ont he windows like my last car did, it does have a single toggle to drop windows. I also like the fact that you can reach both left/right window toggles by spanning your hand, which has some nice symmetry.

I've found that to be true. But can anyone explain the physics behind it?

Your body becomes part of the antenna. If you're young enough to remember TV before cable & satellite, if you touched the antenna (rabbit ears) it would usually get a better signal. Or, remove the FM antennae from your radio and then touch the connector... a better signal.

Now if some physics major wants to hop on here and get all technical about wave lengths and human body conductivity, please go ahead. I don't know how the TV & FM analogies translate to the frequency of the remote transmitters (433MHz?). All I understand is that you're adding to the size of the antenna which increases the effective distance.

Yep, this definitely works with my remote.

The light from LED number display on auto A/C and Speedo is polarized, if you wear polarized sunglasses, you need to move away from normal sitting position in order to see it clearly. Annoying feature.

I wear polarized sunglasses and haven't had that problem, in fact I have never noticed the display was polarized. Have you tried this with a different pair of glasses to see if you have the same problem? The polarization on different brands of glasses may be different and solve this for you.

Speaking of tow hooks. . .

I strongly suggest that everyone buy a second one. They are not really meant to be used to tow the vehicle at anything but a snail's pace, but they are meant to secure the vehicle while in transit.

If you must get towed, you want BOTH of them to be used to secure your car or the tow truck driver will pick something under your car that might not be strong enough.

When the dealer was going through my car with me when I picked it up, he said that the perforations in the parcel shelves don't really serve any purpose except to get more "vroom" noise in the car. I've read somewhere in these forums that if you leave the seats down, the car sounds more powerful - i.e., you get more of the engine sound. So by putting the perforations there, the exhaust noise is not dampened.

- tj

changing brands of polarized sunglass lenses should make little difference as the polarizing filter has to be in the lens at the right angle to filter out glare off horizontal surfaces so all brands, if they were made correctly, have to have the polarizing filter at the same angle....some polarizng lenses do an incomplete job of it tho but they are all pretty close to the same as far as their polarizing properties