[jwasbury]

I've posted this in other MINI threads...

Great cars to drive, but terribly designed POSs IMO. Wife and I bought an '06 MCS new. To be fair, the car was reliable for us, but there were far too many stupid little maintenance issues for my taste. Once out of warranty, I had initially planned to DIY on the car. Spent the $ on the Bentley book (excellent, BTW), some special tools, and my first DIY project was an encouraging success (serpentine belt replacement). When I decided the clutch needed bleeding is when DIY went sideways. Let's just say that the clutch circuit appears to be un-bleedable (to me). Yes I know the factory method is to maintain the slave cylinder in a compressed state during bleeding, I did that. No dice after literally hours of futzing. I gave up, called AAA and had the thing towed to the dealer. Service writer at dealer said their tech took "several hours" to bleed it. That's a factory trained tech, with all the correct tools. Ridiculous!

My wife really likes the MINI so it was her call to trade up for a 2013 model. I told her I wanted nothing to do with it. Still trying to convince her that the Cayman is her next car...might be getting somewhere with that