I Bought a Factory Flawed Mini Cooper Turbo for $1,000 at Auction! How did Mini Get Away with This?

all right here we go three two one what's that german engineering it's what makes the best cars in the world the worst cars to own the v10 based bmw m5 is a near perfect example of a car that can provide an incredible experience while in the driver's seat and a horrific one behind the dealer service counter even being well over a decade old this is a car that is still extremely alluring to an enthusiast especially at their current price points certain examples can be bought for less than a new kia but a single out of warranty repair can cost more than a new kia even on a diy basis the parts prices for the m5 rival those on a lamborghini for the money that these cars will eventually cost their owners i'd argue that there are many better cars to consider when i bought this m5 at auction with no mechanical issues listed for just four thousand dollars it seemed too good to be true and it was besides every light illuminated on the dash it had an engine knock which was diagnosed as a spun rod bearing by my friend in bmw tech steven over eurocharged the cost for replacement use engine and install would have been at least five figures which might be worth it for some examples but not this first year hundred sixty thousand mile smelly m5 just wasn't worthy of being rebuilt while we didn't win on this one we also didn't really lose i think we'll easily be able to recoup what we paid for it back at auction on the way home from eurocharge i dropped the m5 back at auction the same auction that earlier in the week i won the bid on this thousand dollar bmw made coupe with a turbocharged engine and a six-speed manual transmission this mini cooper s was listed as an on runner like the m5 it's over a decade old but out of a handful of photos provided from the auction this one right here the steering lock warning light points to a common stupid failure on bmws one that's super easy to overcome and repair and likely why it won't run we'll get to this specific issue in a moment but i think it's important to address a common question that's been posted regularly in my latest videos why sam do you do this to yourself it's simple the mystery in cars like this cheap mini cooper is almost too fun not to solve even if the answer is catastrophic if you buy the car right there's very little to lose now another frequent question i'd like to address is how i insure my cars that have branded titles like working on a bmw shopping for insurance when you have a unique situation used to be a pretty tedious and time consuming process that was until i found policy genius policy genius is the easiest place for americans to find insurance that fits their life and budget they've helped over a hundred thousand families get tailor-made insurance by combining new school tech with their team of experts their simple online questionnaire only took me about four minutes to complete and i was presented with multiple home and auto policies on one page making it super easy to compare against my current policy all the auto policies presented were from top companies and ones that would provide insurance for my branded title fleet one of my favorite parts is that when it comes time for renewal policy genius will reshop on your behalf to assure you get the best deal possible and policy genius is always committed to your privacy will never ever sell your information nor add on any extra fees policy geniuses save their home and auto insurance customers an average of one thousand one hundred and twenty seven dollars a year if you wanna see if some of those savings are waiting for you just visit policygenius.com sam crack or click the link in the description box i really enjoy these new school companies putting to bed the old school tactics of businesses like insurance sales so i really appreciate policy genius for saving me a good bit of money a lot of time and for also sponsoring this video now in order to understand our mini's really stupid issue let's go back to the absolutely dreadful range rover you remember the silver one with the blown head gasket in order for me to start this car i'd have to get in pull a fuse put the fuse back in and then turn the key in the ignition if i ever pulled the key out of the ignition i'd repeat this same process this is because of a really stupidly designed steering column lock implemented as an anti-theft device an anti-theft device that can literally be defeated by pulling a fuse anyway this steering column lock mechanism itself will fail mechanically sending an electric signal to the immobilizer module lock up your steering wheel and ignition and prevent you from even just starting the car will literally leave its owner stranded if they didn't know about the fuse trick repair costs at the rover dealer for this very common issue is 4 000 according to this old form post the silver range rover was a bmw based car the steering column lock was a bmw based design bmw implemented this similar anti-theft steering column lock on a lot of their other cars and mini coopers up until 2007. our auction mini is a 2007. after doing a bit of research the lock and immobilizer system can fail in a very similar mechanical or electrical way to the land rovers but even more ridiculous it has a built-in counter that will just kill the steering locks operation as the car gets used once a specific number is hit a code is thrown into the immobilizer module and your mini becomes a large stationary stereo i got home last night i took a little look around this mini cooper and i'm really excited this is an excellent mystery car that has clues all over it starting with the hood scoop here that's got this cheesy kind of carbon fiber wrap over it it is cracked right here i think that's a common issue on these cars somebody put some plasti dip over the mini cooper emblem of course we've got the hood stripes overall the body condition of the car is excellent the front end does have a few little paint issues some cracking down here this looks like it was sprayed aftermarket very cheaply and then we've got a little bit of paint chippage here nothing that's too big most of the black trim has been plasti-dipped so stuff that we could probably clean up really easily i guess would be protected from that the first thing i did was i opened the hood because the battery was completely dead and lo and behold this is a battery from april of this year so that was a huge score in itself i went and charged it overnight and it tested just fine something else that was pretty obvious we've got that blue charge pipe right here coming off the turbocharger that's clearly aftermarket as is this vacuum hose here and then this looks like another piece of turbo piping pulled the oil dipstick uh that all looks fairly good and clean now you guys let me know in the comment section below i've never dealt with a mini cooper is this the factory oil dipstick with that kind of point at the end or is that something that's after market and obviously you guys might have seen it in the picture you might have seen it when the car was getting loaded it's got a set of konig wheels on it i love konig wheels i have them on the m3 and these ones look pretty good along with good tires so for a thousand bucks this is an incredible parts car how it sits but i didn't buy it for parts i bought it to get it up and running and i want to do it cheap since this generation mini cooper's been around so long people have figured out how to defeat this annoying steering column lock issue in a very simple fashion but remember there's two sides to this problem a mechanical one and an electrical one in order to really rectify our situation we got to take care of both but we're going to start with the simpler of the two that's the electrical side we're going to use carly our diagnostic tool to get into the module that controls the lock and clear the codes and once we clear the codes it might lead to really a free fix before we get to the mechanical side of things but just think of this as like us pulling the fuse on our range rover until the actual lock is fixed in the steering column we're not quite out of the woods doing the same thing it was doing before we just have the uh steering wheel lock on there if we put our foot on the clutch and we push the key in push to start nothing still not working try it again i just bought that golf cart and they're literally getting slobber everywhere come on please please all right so i plugged carly in down here uh did light up so it's working i'm going to pull out my phone we're going to diagnose this mini all right check it out we have uh more issues than just that steering wheel lock but there it is right there steering column switch three issues let's go to the steering column switch see what it says under voltage i'm fairly certain this won't do anything but we're going to just clear just the codes in the steering column switch module and then we're going to hit close and let's see if that did anything put on the clutch push the key in and out one more time huh i'll notice that the red uh icon is gone but now it's like it's telling us that our key doesn't work anymore maybe the key has to be reprogrammed to this maybe we don't even have the right key who knows it's pretty cool that carly seemed to work with full functionality on our mini cooper i've shown you guys what this thing is capable of dealer level diagnostic and coding so if you've got a mini cooper or a bmw and want to check one out for yourself i'm going to drop a link in the description box again we cleared our steering column lock module and that light has gone away i haven't seen it since and i've put that key in and out of the ignition probably a couple dozen times after it's not popped up once but what continues to pop up is that yellow key lock warning light that's telling us that this car is not recognizing the key which is super strange because if you look at the auction photos clearly the accessory power was on something that i haven't been able to do with this car at all it hasn't even given me an odometer reading the radio won't turn on all the stuff that you can see in the auction photos i haven't been able to replicate so something has malfunctioned between this car arriving to auction and coming home with me i figured it really wouldn't do much but for good measure i stuck a fresh battery in the key fob and guess what it did absolutely nothing so i started to think like a mini dealer we've got a car that won't recognize its key what is the first solution that would be well sell me a new key so i called it the local mini dealer explained that i just bought this car from auction and they told me that i need to get the car to them remember the car doesn't run or drive it's stuck on a trailer so they'd have to be trailered to them then they would want proof of ownership which i'm still waiting for the title from the auction and be about three to four hundred bucks and i would receive it in the mail like a week later because they don't provide them there in person after doing a little bit more digging it might not actually fix our problem you see the immobilizer system in this car is the same exact one you'd find on a bmw of the same year these immobilizers fail they have the same exact issue that our mini cooper has which is basically telling you hey we can't recognize the key so we've got a problem likely between our immobilizer and our key which is also matched to the engine computer now again if this was brought to the mini dealership and figured out there they'd likely issue a new key a new immobilizer module and then they'd have to program all three going back to my original guesstimation i think that that's a couple grand and likely why this car was just traded in for something different there's a couple solutions to this one it's quite funny parts breakers actually sell both the engine computer the immobilizer and a key set on ebay between about 500 and a thousand dollars because they know that this is a common failure on this car and well it would just require us to remove all these modules and replace them but the only issue with that is if you replace it with a set it doesn't quite match your particular car in this case we have a mini cooper s so it's a turbocharged engine manual transmission and we have the comfort access package if the junk car the module came from had anything different well the car might not run it might not run right or you might lose out on some features the other option is to send it into a company that has figured out how these modules all work can test and repair them and that's exactly what i think we're going to do here i found a company called ecu team i call them up and for between three and eight hundred dollars depending on what's broken and what needs programming they will diagnose all your modules along with your key and will replace and or reprogram them when your module fails in let's say like a bmw 3 series in order to get your immobilizer out of the car it's just in your foot well comes out in probably about three to four minutes in the mini cooper they buried it under the dashboard we are ready to start tearing into the mini cooper i brought all the tools with me i think that are going to be necessary for the job i got my torx bit set supposedly the dashboard is put together with just a bunch of torx screws i've got the torx keys to get into tight spaces and then our plastic trim panel tools to just pry anything so we don't break it but it just dawned on me i drove the golf cart out here to work on the mini do you realize i spent five times the amount of money for this golf cart as i did on the mini if this car ends up running and driving after the little bit of work we do to it uh i still think repairing this car will cost way less than half that of the golf cart now don't get me wrong this golf cart is pretty awesome and i bought it used so i even got it way less than it cost new i think this thing is close to eight or nine thousand dollars new my favorite feature is the momo steering wheel but could you imagine you could buy a running driving automobile with a turbo charger in it in a manual transmission for a fraction of the price of the golf car well let's not talk too soon let's rip the mobilizer out of the dashboard then we'll move to the engine bay get the engine computer out we'll see if we can't make our mini cooper great again [Music] this should be the last oh it just fell in there i'll never find that again but this should be the last come on i've been tugging at this for ages there's something still holding it in place come on oh it's one more one more let's see if i can get back there okay and there's one with our lower column trim here all removed you can see the silver box on the bottom this is the steering wheel lock this is the part that can mechanically fail we're not quite sure whether ours has mechanically filled what we do know is if this isn't a dress well everything is all apart we could fix everything else and then when the computer senses a problem with this it's going to leave us stranded so there is a solution to eliminate this now since this is an older car the aftermarket has developed a cheaper simpler and permanent solution to this problem now the second module we got to take out is called the dme um oh this is interesting didn't notice this not the frog but um this is something that's just hanging out probably mounts see those latches right there oh easy as that just go ahead and sort this okay going back to the dme usually when it comes to bmws they hide their uh engine control modules somewhere underneath like cowling such a few moments of fumbling around trying to figure out what the dme is it's right in front of our face see these main harnesses here to that cover this cover should just pop off right there and it's as simple as a couple plugs one three there's just a few little push tabs in these holes i'm assuming they're there in the bracket so with a couple hours it's worth the work we'll ship these guys off we'll see if our mini is forever a paperweight or if it's just a computer malfunction now besides what i've already shown you some of the stuff under the hood the aftermarket wheels i'm fairly certain again mini cooper guys can comment on this this is a pretty loaded up car it's got these kind of pleated leather seats with the white piping uh that headrest is in the back i just took it off whenever we were disassembling everything it's got this gigantic sunroof so i think this is a pretty loaded up premium version of a mini cooper some people are going to laugh at that but these cars knew over 30 grand again for a thousand bucks i'm thrilled i'm just hoping that once that cast module and key are diagnosed at the technician shop that they can figure out exactly what's going on and if it's as simple as a plug and play repair we're going to be good to go so with our modules out of the mini i'm going to pack them up ship them to ecu team and in a few days time we should find out whether there is an actual problem with the key uh the cast system itself or both and then the second i hear from them i'm gonna post an update on my instagram if you're not already following me you can go right here or click the link in the description box below it's been a while since i bought a car this cheap i'm trying to think maybe the the dxp car is the only other car i bought in the same price range the one was 525 the other one was 850 bucks i think so slightly more expensive but this is a heck of a car for a little bit over a thousand dollars if it is just a module repair now mind you if we start it up and there's a problem with the turbo or it's missing well we could very quickly start dumping hundreds of dollars more into it but uh either way we've got quite a bit of room to play with this car and if you're as excited about it as i am be sure to hit that like button it was just a few months ago i sold my ford fiesta sd the first car i ever rebuilt which was a turbocharged hot hatch kind of like this mini cooper and i daily drove that car for about three years driving it more than any other car i have so this would definitely fill that gap in my garage and for the price how do you beat it now i want to hear from you guys what other cheap auction car should i be on the lookout for to gamble on i think somewhere in the 500 to 5 000 price range is a safe spot to be mitigates the risk of the really expensive cars and uh if you win while you win big maybe with this if you don't you still got a car for a thousand bucks that has well over a thousand bucks worth of parts on it so drop a line in the comment section let me know what you want to see and as always i appreciate each and every one of you for tuning in today i'll catch you very soon [Music] you

Channel: Samcrac

Views: 436,961

Rating: 4.8663669 out of 5

Keywords: mini, cooper, carly, turbo, cooper s, works, john cooper, turbocharged, supercharged, r56, bmw, dme, cas, M5, M3, 335i, twin, cheap, junk, auction, trade, manual, 6 speed, tune, tuner, project cars, MINI, swap, electric, diagnostic, diagnosis, mechanic, diag

Id: 0RIT0Q0wgjM

Length: 18min 57sec (1137 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020