Horay! I just picked up Mario (the Cooper) from the repair shop.
I got a more complete story out of the guy at the repair shop. The noise that started 7-8k miles ago was the mainshaft bearing getting ready to go. The bizarre thing is that it would only make noise under load and the noise followed the speed of the car, not the speed of the engine. I figured at the worst it was a U-Joint in one of the drive half-shafts; but alas, transmission.
Apparently I was lucky in I got it to them when I did. The tech didn’t get 100 yards on their eval test-drive before the transmission completely gave out: [PING!-clunk!-BANG!], couldn’t get it back into first after making a U-Turn, push back to shop leaving a trail of transmission fluid. When he got it apart, the [clunk!-BANG!] the tech heard was the mainshaft bearing finally seizing, shattering and putting a three inch hole in the bell housing… so my transmission was quite literally cratered.
Wait, catastrophic transmission failure at only 110k miles?! The official line from MINI is that “It’s not common, but it’s not unheard-of”, which I would translate to “the dealer sees this around twice a month”. The quiet story/rumour is that transmission mainshaft bearing seizure was a problem known to MINI, but the frequency-to-complaint/possible-litigation ratio was such that a recall would have been be cost-prohibitive. The story further is that all MINI replacement transmissions have this issue fixed. Did I get a transmission from MINI? According to the repair shop I did.
So, my “no problems so far” car has turned into my “no problems except this one really expensive one” car. Will I see the same issue again at 220k miles? I hope not. Really, I’ll be happy if I don’t have any more big issues with my car in the 16-18 months. I figure by then I’ll have gotten my money’s worth out of the repair. After the collision three years ago, I had intended on “driving the wheels off the car”; we’ll see if I get far enough that hindsight isn’t too painful to my pocketbook.
They had boxed up the old transmission, but hadn’t sent it back yet, so I was able to kind of see the hole, but wasn’t able to get pictures of the damage; suffice to say that exposed drive gears aren’t a GoodThing™. They did give me a plastic bag of pieces that fell out when the tech dropped the transmission (picture here).