36000 miles? You did well .

For me the dealer is(was) across the street but I would rather not see him often. In fact, and I m not exaggerating, the no. of times I have been to the service in 1 year is equivalent to the no. of times I took my civic to the dealer for regular maintenance.

As an update, the MiniUSA CR guy did call back (it seems they call me back every wednesday )- 2 weeks of turnaround time just to tell me that a service engineer from Mini can come ride with me in my car to see if the noise is out of ordinary or within normal parameters. Well, I already know the answer. I told him thanks but I have sold the car. He was in a mild shock and couldn't find any words to say.

I guess if you are willing to take a chance then its OK. As long as the dealership is closeby then you can get the quirks worked out. Or you can wait till the two common problems of cold start chatter and 3-2 groan are recognized by mini and a fix is available (at the very least). Other problems seem quite sporadic

 

Funny, my brand new mini with 1500 miles on it is already having the transmission replaced. They cant fixx a short causing the car to go into safety mode so they are replacing the tranny. Unfortunately its a refurbished transmission. I now have a car where if I want to sell it, I have to say its got a new transmission. Ill have a hell of a time selling that! Really sucks. I am so dissappointed. I am going to eventually sell and get a new car. I keep praying that the will say its a lemon and refund the price of the car.

 

I read your other post. Frankly, almost any new car you get will have problems. I read your other car was 94 mercedes that you sold. Mercedes is not up there in quality these days (although they are better than Mini).
New cars have so much electronics in them, something will go wrong. I think Pre-98 cars had better reliability. I had a 95 taurus which i bought used in 2001 and used it for 2 years. For a ford with over 100k miles ( and i paid $3000 for it) it gave me just 2 problems over 2 years and that too because i selected a bad mechanic. The brake pads they put in broke in 6 months and the ignition wires were leaking current. I got them to replace both for free. I sold the car for $2000. Not bad for using it for 2 years and putting on 16000 miles.

Mini problems are higher than average and its about time Mini starts hiring good quality managers. The jackasses at Mini should loan some Black belt engineers from GE (and some for their suppliers). Mini suffers from another problem - design flaw. Because of the compact nature of the car, the engineers are trying to squeeze in a lot in really small space. This leads to too many problems down the line and I fear, Mini is not doing sufficient road test before it puts the car into production.