As my daughter left the house today, she wound up pulling over a few hundred yards from our house and called to say that the steering was very hard on her Mini and that the battery warning light was on.

I've done some searching and based on threads here and elsewhere, I feel that the alternator may be the culprit with ~156k miles on the Mini, that's not unreasonable to suspect. The battery was replaced this past Winter by the previous owner (it has an 11/20 date sticker), so that is likely still good.

I swapped cars with my daughter and drove the Mini back to the house. I checked the battery voltage while the engine was running, and it started reading at 11.93V and over time dropped to 11.92V and then 11.91V. So, my take is that we caught the alternator failure very early, and the battery is no longer being charged.

The only other thing I would ask - based on other items I read about in my research - at this age, are there certain wire or connection points that may have also failed that I should check that might contribute to these symptoms? Also, I plan to clean the EPS motor - I'm trying to find a valid link to the write-up for that.

I'll document my repair results here.

 

Test alternator. Happened to me. Lost steering too.

 

I'll be posting the conclusions of the repair in this new thread (https://www.northamericanmotoring.co...ml#post4600716), as I'm going to add some preventive maintenance to job, while I have the engine that exposed to replace the alternator, anyway.

 

The detail is in that other thread, but to quickly summarize here: replacing the alternator fixed this EPS issue. I did a bunch of other work while I was in there. Our Mini is back on the road!