2007 Mini cooper

This car was another Craigslist find.  The posting stated that it ran and drove but had engine issues.

Whenever I’m looking at a vehicle I figure out all the pricing and costs so that my “worst case scenario” is that I break even; after all I’m not in it to lose money, I’m trying to get ahead.  I broke even on this car.

 Surprisingly, when I picked the car up it ran and drove pretty well.  I spent a fair amount of time troubleshooting the issue and couldn’t get it figured out.  The whole time I was troubleshooting it I was able to drive it back and forth to work, most days without much issue.  I finally brought it to a local shop I trust and asked them to look into it but I told them no more than 2 hours of diagnostics.  If they couldn’t identify the issue within 2 hours then I needed to just pass the car down the road and maybe make a couple hundred bucks in the process.

When I spoke with the guys at the shop after a few days the mechanic told me “well, we put a lot more that a couple hours into it”.  I said “that’s fine but I only agreed to pay for two”.  “Yeah, I know” he said, “but our pride got the better of us and we had to keep digging until we figured it out”.  And they did.  Turned out to be a bad exhaust valve; apparently the valves are prone to fracture and when they do the engine continue to run but throws a series of codes and loses power.

The shop owner knew what I was trying to do with the car and he offered to simply buy me out.  That way I wouldn’t lose anything and he would be able to repair the car and resell it so he could minimize his loss on the labor hours. 

Not the best case scenario for me but not all that bad either.  I got to drive a fun little Mini around for a couple months (which got twice the fuel economy of my daily driver; direct cost savings) learned a little about working on Mini’s and in the end got all my money back.  I actually made $13 dollars.

Deal done, onto the next one.