Armed with the Mini Cooper forums, I knew I could (hopefully) take on any of the additional problems that could arise with my new car. Here was hoping!
My mom and I decided to take the car to a holiday party (yes, all of this fun with the car mentioned in the first three posts happened in a matter of 3 months), and we arrived without incident. Every completed ride without incident was another reason to celebrate!
We had a great time at the party, ate some yummy food, and then decided it was time to head home. As we got into the car and were mid-entrance, when the entire car went black. There were no lights, the automatic things didn't work, and there was no hope of it starting. Fantastic.
My mom went back into the party while I started ripping apart the back seat. I knew there was an emergency release in the back seat somewhere (see the previous post), and the problems seemed to be stemming from ANOTHER dead battery.
Thank goodness I have great roommates. I "phoned a friend", and Ryan, my rommate that used to work at a local oil change shop, hacked into their database, downloaded a photo of the emergency release, and texted it to me. Side note; what did we do before todays smart phones? Sure enough - his picture showed the emergency release exactly where the forums had as well. However, in my car, no luck. It was no where to be found.
The very nice man who my mom found helped as best he could to locate the release, and we finally decided to attempt to roll start the car. Luckily we were parked on a hill, so they pushed me down as I popped the clutch. No luck, so they had to roll me back up the hill... We decided we needed more help, so our kind man-friend went back into the party to find the guests who were engineers.
At this point my car is in pieces around the snow banks. There's a bottom seat on the right, my manual on the left, speaker covers near the seat, and assorted other pieces in the back. It looked like my car decided to have a yard sale.
The engineers arrived, and more attempts were made to find the release. We decided that the release just wasn't in the car (come to find out my model of the car did not have one, despite it being in the manual and the forums... when asked how I should plan on an emergency exit should I get stuck, the kind dealership told me that I should just break a window.) The plan changed to bring jumper cables through the cab if we could uncover the battery.
More parts of the car were pulled out, and finally we were able to locate the battery. Turns out my fantastic installation of the battery was not so great... Even with asking the dealership to check it, somehow the connection had come completely off the battery, hence the lovely lack of power when we got in. Yay for the engineers! They kindly re-connected my battery and sent me on my way.
The Mini Cooper has provided many great stories, and I still have the car. Luckily it has been sans problems for the past few months, but I will never buy a car from that dealership ever again, and I hope the car will last for many happy years. My first car buying experience is one I don't plan on duplicating again for quite a while!
No comments:
Post a Comment