I’ve recently written about my experience with EVs, and if you’ve read those posts you’ll know that I’ve gotten my hands on a 2009 Mini Cooper S that I’m going to be using as my daily. It’s now two weeks since we got the car home and I thought I’d share some of my experience.

First up, a controversial topic: naming your car. It’s something I never did until I met my wife, and since then we’ve always given our cars a name based on the letters in the number plate. I’ve gone a slightly different route with this one though. I’m a dad, so awful jokes are a must, and growing up I loved the Blues Brothers, so the car has been christened “Minnie the Cooper”, a play on the song Minnie the Moocher by Cab Calloway. If you’ve not heard that song you’re missing out.

Before I even test drove Minnie I did as much research as I could on the model, to try and avoid going blindly into something with numerous issues. I’m not going to lie there are plenty of potential problems.

High pressure fuel pump? Prone to failure. Thermostat housing? Prone to failure. Timing chain tensioner? Prone to failure. Lots of other components? You guessed it, they’re prone to failure. Overall it seems like there are a fair few design flaws in some of the components.

Fortunately, Minnie had a full service history and the invoices to show what work had been done, and a lot of the “major” ones had been done fairly recently. Truth be told, after driving it I’d probably have still bought it and just accepted that work needed doing, but the history gave me some peace of mind while I could still go in expecting a bit of a project at some point.

Project wise I don’t think she’s going to disappoint, in the first couple of weeks the thermostat (one of those common failure points and one of the few that hadn’t been done according to the service history) kicked the bucket, so I’ve had a replacement installed. Then, while I was taking her to get the thermostat replaced an engine warning light came on, oh dear. It’s not an easy to identify problem with that one either, the fault code points at several potential causes, chief among which is the High Pressure Fuel Pump which was replaced around 4 years ago (I thought recently enough to not be an immediate problem). We’ve cleared the code for now and we’re going to see how it runs with the new thermostat, but I have a feeling that might come up again.

While I was researching issues both before and after buying the car, it became quickly apparent how many problems there are with Mini and BMW cars. Historically I think German cars have been held to a high standard in terms of both performance and reliability but the sheer volume of issues you can find indicates this might be slipping, for BMW at the very least.

You’re always going to see complaints from people more than comments from happy customers, and some failures may be caused by poor maintenance or missed scheduled services, and I can see that argument in some cases. If you’re skipping servicing you’re asking for trouble, but BMW at the very least have also stretched the service schedules out; when I had a 1 series BMW a few years go the schedule was a service every two years or 18,000 miles rather than an annual service. Sticking to this schedule didn’t stop my crankshaft from failing within warranty, and it’s probably stretching the life of some components. It’s been so bad in some cases BMW have been the subject of class action suits.

Outside of servicing, some of the failure points I’ve read about seem to stem from poor quality components. Things that were historically made out of metal have been replaced with plastic alternatives: cheaper and faster to make, but less robust, especially in places with temperature variances like thermostats, cooling systems etc. Plastic components do allow for more complex structures in some cases potentially improving efficiency in certain areas, but there isn’t any doubt that thermal stress and vibrations are more likely to cause issues with plastic components than metal ones. Cost definitely feels like one of the driving factors, and I’m not sure whether the aim was to reduce cost for the manufacturer to improve profits, or reduce upfront cost for the customer. In either case it feels like in the longer term it is going to prove more expensive.

My personal experience has been with Mini and BMW, so they’re the brands I’ve done the most research into, but I wonder if other brands have had similar issues. The VW “diesel gate” scandal springs to mind as a indication of other brands potentially cutting corners in the hope of doing things quickly rather than doing them well. I also know that Volkswagen Audi Group (VAG) have had issues caused by plastic coolant pipes, but I haven’t looked into those too much.

I also wonder what parallels we can draw with other industries. In my own career the best comparison I can make is to the tech debt that we add to systems over time by doing things quickly. Reducing that upfront cost of implementation but increasing the cost of maintenance in the long term. One example from myself was implementing a new feature in a web application. We had several applications with a lot of a similar code, and the better solution for the long term would have been to build the new feature once in a way it could be shared between them all. Instead for budgetary reasons we had to implement it for one specific application first, and then either repeat that isolated implementation in all the other applications, or rewrite it in the shared way and migrate. Delivers instant value, quickly and cheaply, but increases the long term maintenance.

I have often found myself in my career stating “we can do it this way and it will be done quicker, but it means more work down the line”, and I imagine a lot of developers have found themselves in a similar boat at one time or another. In a lot of cases I’d be willing to bet the key decision makers want to take the fast approach and worry about the maintenance in the future - likely when it’s someone elses problem. I now find myself wondering if there was an engineer at BMW somewhere, sat saying “we could make the thermostat out of plastic but that will break more often and lead to more maintenance”, who was overruled for similar reason reasons - an improved profit margin, lower upfront cost, or improved share values.

As cars become less mechanical there are less physical failure points and less moving parts, but I wonder if we will see similar cycles continue to repeat themselves with the software that is now so crucial for a lot of modern vehicles. Rather than a fragile mechanical component, will we see the systems running the car break more often in the interest of getting things to market quickly. A corner cut on the software for air conditioning that means it stops working correctly, or a driving assist system that refuses to stay turned off (I’m looking at you MG). What about a self driving system that doesn’t work quite as well as it should? Or outside of the automotive industry, a software fault that could cause a plane to crash (I’m looking at you Boeing). Humans aren’t perfect, and the systems we build won’t be perfect either, but by rushing them, cutting corners, or thinking we might address problems later we just increase the risk of things going wrong. It’s a double edged argument though, and ultimately a company is beholden to it’s shareholders. Balancing those short term gains with long term reliability, safety and maintenance are going to be crucial for all industries.