Meet The Unkillable Mini: Tales From A Service Advisor

It all started about a year and a half ago. As so frequently happens, a Mini showed up in our parking lot. The owner, Kellina, was new to the car, and as far as she knew, the previous owner had put the front of the car into a snowbank. The car had been reassembled somewhat haphazardly and in fairness to the previous owner, they didn’t try to sell it in “good condition.” As it was October, this would have occurred sometime before this little blue car with suspicious ride height came to us. But it was no big deal, as we see cars with new owners and all sorts of backstories all the time. Since the car was new to the owner, we thought it would be wise to do an inspection too; let’s see how much work this “runs and drives but needs some work” car actually needs.

And thus began the journey of a 2004 Mini Cooper that by all logic shouldn’t be alive today. As soon as I took it around to the back lot, I knew something was up. The brief 100-yard journey revealed a cacophony of alarming noises from the steering and suspension, but at least the car was running somewhat. Which is to say it started on the first try and made it the whole way without dying. 

The diagnosis from the snowbank misadventure and overall inspection wasn’t pretty. Many Mini Coopers have a radiator core support that seems to be made of the flimsiest plastic it is possible to get away with. I swear, if you merely sneeze too close to the front of the car, the support breaks. We see them frequently destroyed by owners who pull into a parking spot and stop when they feel the front of the car touch the curb. Acceptable behavior in an SUV can be an expensive bill in a Mini, especially if it’s been lowered. Naturally, it didn’t stand a chance against a snowbank. The suspension had also taken a good bit of damage too though if that was from wintery misadventure is anyone’s guess. On top of this it was leaking oil, about half of the steering components were toast, there was no air filter for the engine, and it was showing a few warnings on the dash. (Editor’s Note: Standard Mini stuff, basically. -PG)

This was the kind of car where I need take a moment to prepare before I break the news to the owner. This wasn’t one of those cars that will be fine a thousand dollars later. It also wasn’t a car with a five-figure value. This was a car where the repairs were going to eclipse the value of the car pretty quickly. This was going to take more than the 600-character limit on the text message, Kellina’s preferred form of contact. 

Using my soft and gentle text message typing, I laid the situation out and much to my surprise the answer was to get it lined up for repair. As I soon discovered, this was no ordinary Mini, this was Minnie. 

Minnie had quickly become Kellina’s darling and she was prepared to take the repairs in stride. I like to encourage owners to tell me their car’s name as it makes them more like a beloved pet and in theory, they’ll take better care of it. My own herd consists of Ibisco, Speranza, Lucretia and Death Wedge and my husband has Fishy, Sushi, and Snowball. I quickly found there was zero chance of Minnie being marched the six sad blocks to our local junkyard.

We set it up as a segmented repair, breaking it up into A and B sets; in this case, some quick stuff we could knock out then the bulk of it a couple of weeks later. Splitting up the repairs on cars with a large number of issues is something we do pretty often and helps to reduce the overwhelming feeling of such cases. It’s easy enough to prioritize a drive belt over hood struts for example. We’d rather our technicians have to prop your hood up while replacing that belt than have to fish out forbidden spaghetti while the hood supports itself. 

In time, Minnie got a pile of new power steering parts, her radiator core support, control arms, a new oil filter housing, a new A/C condenser and a couple of other odds and ends. All things seemed to be in order, or at least progressing in that direction.

Then Minnie made it about two months before she was back. 

Some of it was just bits held off from the original list, the “C” group. More pressing was a new check engine light and a new oil leak. Something had hit under the car, smacking the oil pan and radiator, causing the fan to work overtime and be much louder than normal. The CEL was just a good ol’ fashioned cam position sensor. For once it felt nice to write up a diagnosis that seemed oddly normal. Once again, Minnie spent a couple of days on the rack being revived from a state that a lesser owner would have sent her to the junkyard for. 

We thought Minnie was all patched up and would behave herself, but as it turned out, Minnie had other plans. Every month or two Kellina would report something new. A door handle that stopped working, an intermittent headlight problem, another check engine light for oxygen sensors, an old aftermarket coolant expansion tank that no longer sealed well, a failing high-pressure fuel pump, a dead alternator. 

Bit by bit, we fixed her up. All the while Kellina started to get to know us more, bringing in doughnuts and breakfast burritos now and then. If you want a shop to become your friend, just bring us food. We’re simple folk and we enjoy a good sprinkle doughnut. On one occasion she even brought in a box of Ritz crackers for us to “feed” Minnie. On the one hand, we love Kellina, on the other we were starting to get a little nervous every time a blue R53 Mini pulled up out front, even when it was a completely different car. That poor Mini just had no intentions of behaving like a normal car. 

Mid-summer, I got a dreaded text. Minnie had been minding her business in the Red Lobster parking lot when a big, mean pickup had smacked into her. Kellina had tried to drive her home thinking the damage was superficial but quickly found she wasn’t going to make it the whole way.  Minnie showed up the next morning on a flatbed with a flat tire, broken side marker light and a cracked bumper as the visible damage, but underneath, we found that a coilover and axle were toast. 

At least this was a good excuse to get rid of those poor-quality coilovers; this was just when Pro-Struts had become available for early modern Minis. The little car that refused to stop having problems would make a perfect test candidate as we knew she would probably be back in a month or two and we could get feedback on this new style of part. It was agreed that we would try these new spring, strut and strut mount assemblies on all four corners. And with that success we felt comfortable putting them on several others since then. Minnie proved to be an outstanding guinea pig and about a dozen other first and second-generation Minis have left the shop with significantly more affordable suspension repairs thanks to her.

By now Minnie was finally starting to behave at least a little bit. She had gone long enough without a major engine repair that she finally started qualifying for normal maintenance. After nearly a year she’d finally pulled off six thousand miles to earn herself a normal oil service. Her inspection didn’t even reveal any new catastrophes, just a valve cover seep that had progressed to a fairly common leak. It was a relief to finally see a “regular” sort of issue that happens to many Minis that have reached their 18th birthday. 

At first four weeks passed. Then another four. Our texts remained oddly quiet. Could it be that this Mini—which by now was built from probably about 30 percent replacement parts—could finally be sorted? Of course not! Shortly before Thanksgiving, Minnie developed a washer sprayer problem and an awful noise from the radiator fan. Not satisfied with a mere handful of new parts, she chose to come home for Christmas as well. Somehow through all of this, her battery had been alright until it finally fell victim to a cold snap. Somehow, she ate her brand new alternator as well. We don’t have to warranty too many parts, but if ever there was a car that would have the bad luck to get the one that slipped through quality control, of course, it would be Minnie.

As I write this in the spring, Minnie has been out in the wild and apparently behaving herself for nearly three months. A couple of times I’ve looked up from my desk and seen a flash of blue go by with Minnie and Mickey decals on the side and a white polka dot wrap on the spoiler. But the light blue Mini Cooper that should have been declared dead about three or four times over by now hasn’t turned into our parking lot. 

Now, of course, by writing this I’ll probably get a text tomorrow that an alligator somehow escaped the zoo and sank its teeth into a radiator hose or something, but it’s ok, Minnie is probably close to due for her next oil service and she’ll only be up to about 32 percent new parts.

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