I have a 2012, and it has been to the dealer once and they "fixed" it but...

In a car wash on the driver side water pours in, not where the window and top meet, but between the parts where the slide is. Passanger side is bone dry.

Any idea what is going on here so I can tell the dealer exactly what needs to be fixed?

 

I have water coming in drivers side where top of window meets convertible top
. 2012 Cooper S convertible.

 

First stop going to car washes. They are never nice to vehicle bodies. Second it the dealers job find the source of the leak. Is the water present after it rains or just from the high pressure of the Mini torture chamber(car wash)?
Mine has never dripped a drop but I have always gently hand bathed ours.
Make the dealer show you proof with a water source when they say it repaired.

 

Thanks, but I love my carwash in our area, it is the moving tunnel one and very nice. Second, it's a car, not a baby and I am disabled, so washing my car in my driveway is not really going to work for me.

No leak after the rain, just the car wash.

The water is not coming in where the window meets the top... but it comes in IN the car, that gap that has the moving parts for the top. But only on the one side.

 

It's sticking in my head that my owner's manual for my 2010 R57 says not to use the high pressure car washes (like the moving tunnel ones).

 

Many convertibles will leak in drive thru car washes. That's nothing unusual. When you shoot a high pressure stream of water directly at the relatively weak seals of a convertible, you are bound to have some leakage. If it leaks in a normal rainstorm that's a problem but in a car wash, that doesn't indicate a problem to me.

You might also try a different car wash. To give you an example, before I had my Mini, I had a Saturn Sky. I took it through one car wash and it was fine. A while later I took it through a different car wash and water sprayed through the seals like crazy. I thought something was wrong. Then a while after that happened, I took it through the first car wash and it was fine again. Turns out that the different car washes sprayed the water at different angles -- one would leak, the other wouldn't.

 

I have a Clubman, and I had a similar situation. It took several trips to get it corrected. They ended up replacing the piece of trim, or gasket if you will, that the window rolls up against when it closes. The first one was slightly deformed and didn't provide a good seal. The second one that they installed, the seal looked good but the material that it was made of had "hardened" in some way and again did not provide a good seal. Third time was the charm.