My Mom is looking to purchase a 2005 thru 2007 Mini Cooper. How reliable are they? Is there anything I should know before she purchases one?

Thanks!
Don

My buddys shop does alot of work for the BMW club and they have a few of the Coopers to, the biggest problems he sees on the early ones was the brakes suck and would warp the rotors. I looked at an S model years ago but went with a GTI 1.8t because of price. They are both like driving a go cart.

I rented one and drove it from Stuttgart, Germany to Prague and back. It was either a 2009 or 2010; I cannot remember. Seemed like a very well built car to me and I definitely put it to the test!

Crap, crap, crappity, crap. Buy anything but a Cooper. And if she has to have it buy the BEST extended warranty you can. They have so many issues as they age I can't get into all of them, lets just say, engine, transmission (CVT garbage), power steering, brakes, and suspension, oh and lots of leaks. Other than all those problems, they are still CRAP.

She is open to any small car like the cooper. She just liked the look of them. Any one have any other cars that have a similar size that they would recomend?

Girlfriend wanted a Cooper to replace her Acura RSX. We drove the Supercharged model that was used with 15000 miles on it . 20 minutes of driving the underpowered cramp piece of crap talked her out of it.

She went with a Nissan Altima coupe with the 4 cylinder with the stick. Had a lot more room than her old RSX but after having 30 thousand on the Nissan the Acura was a much more solid car,just to bad it wasnt just a little bigger.

You buy a Cooper for the wow factor not the reliability

My wife had an '04 Cooper S for about 6 years and put 60k on it.
The car was a great little car. She was in love with it and was sad to see it go.
It never had any real issues at all.
The S runs OK, but the standard cooper is a turd.
Our car was a stick shift.

They had a great lease program a couple months ago. Normally shy away from leases but I think it was like $200 or so (plus some cash down) if I remember right.

Audi A3 2,0TFSI. Great car, and cost about the same.

My buddy is a service writer w/ Mini and has been for years. Early cars had issues w/ sunroof drains clogging causing leaks into passenger floorboards which shorts a major computer under seat. The factory maintenance program is hard on the turbos, after 15K miles the oil tends to get low and the turbos get gunked up due to low oil/high heat. New ones are far better than the early 02-03 models. Cars seem to hold up well if taken care of, they just took in an 05 Cooper S w/ 125K miles on it and the guy bought another one.