I have an 03 Cooper with about 25,000 miles on it now and have owned it for about 5 months now. I must admit I'm getting a little nervous about the car, particularly the automatic gearbox. Knock on wood, no problems so far. So my question is, how often do these gearboxes fail? Is this common, and I'm 250 miles from the nearest MINI dealer. Fortunately, I bought an extended warranty, but that only mildly relieves my anxiety. Any word of comfort, warning, or advice maybe helpful.

 

Remember most of the time you only hear about the bad here. With the auto tranny you have to think the large numbers of Minis that have them compared to the ones that have had problems still pretty small number. That said none should break and they should last forever Hope you don't have any problems and just drive the tires off it.

 

I have an 05 MCSa with 21K and many mod's and I've had NO problems at all with the tranny. Have you noticed something wrong with your gearbox? If not I wouldn't worry about it much.