What did you do to your MINI today?

We had a Westy vanagon when I first got my license, so that was the car I learned to drive. Now my SE is my favorite car I've ever owned, except for maybe my 1958 Westy I had in college.
My brother's 40-hp 1958 VW Bus was the slowest accelerating vehicle I've ever experienced. You must have had some other reason for liking that Westy. Besides being the first vehicle you drove, did you experience another kind of first in that bus?
 
I would bet the reason they are different is that the automatic transmission accelerator pedal has a kick down switch in it. These are used when the driver floors the pedal to let the transmission know it is time to release all of the hamsters to their wheels and select the lowest possible gear for maximum acceleration. That would also explain why the SE uses the manual transmission pedal; no transmission therefore, no kick down...
Logic tracks. Kick down doesn't make sense for us, here is a side by side of the original (left) and the incorrect automatic with kick down (right.) The plugs are incompatible so there is no way to mess it up. All of the fitment checks on various vendors websites don't know how to handle SE, luckily some have simple return policies and I was able to experiment a bit.
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My brother's 40-hp 1958 VW Bus was the slowest accelerating vehicle I've ever experienced. You must have had some other reason for liking that Westy. Besides being the first vehicle you drove, did you experience another kind of first in that bus?
I had the 1700 cc w/ the freeway flyer gear in it. Drove on the freeway at 70 no problem.

The vanagon was my first vehicle.
 
I swapped out the plain old pedals for OEM stainless ones. Biggest gotcha - SE uses the manual transmission accelerator pedal not automatic! They are ever so slightly different but not interchangeable.

Parts:
Accelerator pedal #35406889816
Brake pedal #35006860690
Dead pedal #51477149471

You have to order each piece, not a kit. Other than that it’s plug and play, no more than 15 minutes to swap it out.
The dead pedal and brake are inlays, but for the accelerator you need the whole module? Ouch.
 
Welp, doing something to the SE, but I’m only part way through the little project, so this is what I did to it today.

I disconnected the 12V battery in order to remove the horn/airbag from the steering wheel. I have not been able to find anybody having done this to an SE online, so I went ahead and did it as per the usual ICE instructions. MINI make it a bit fiddly to get at the battery’s negative terminal, but it’s still fairly quick work. One thing I realized from only one of the mini videos I checked out was that it’s much easier to remove the rubber seal first, followed by the cover piece closer to the cowl, and finally the cover over the battery; too many of the videos showed how to remove the cover over the battery and then futzing with the part over the cowl — and barely getting enough room to remove the ground cable.

With the low-voltage battery disconnected, I opened the driver’s door, and lo and behold, everything lit up like normal! I was not excited by this. I decided to take a break and went inside for lunch. Back into the garage half an hour later, and it was still lit up. Grrr. I continued to do some other stuff in the garage, and wouldn’t you know it, it all shut down at around the 45 minute mark. Excellent.

In another post I will detail the airbag removal, but that’s a story in itself. Meanwhile, when I eventually reconnected the 12 V battery, the system reinitialized and updated the time and date, and the GOM jumped from the typical 162 km it has been showing on a full charge lately… to 192 km. I’ve never seen it predict more than 180. Weird.
 
What a PITA to get the airbag off. Smh. Of course, after spending 45 minutes using a T20 driver (and cursing, and wearing out my fingertips) trying to remove the horn/airbag as advised on multiple sites and YouTube channels (sorry, @tweedbean and others!), I finally managed to prise it off.

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Then I opened the HOD emulator box and inside found every tool I could possibly need — including a 2.6 mm pig-nose security screw driver, which is perfect for grabbing onto the MINI’s wire spring to manoeuvre it away from the hooks on the steering wheel (it came to good use the multiple times I had to remove the airbag to reposition the emulator and its sheathed wires!).

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Next step: figuring out what FDL changes needed for it to work with the SE. Stay tuned!
 
I’ll get to that part, but the secret is in the box pictured above. ;) It’s a hands-on-drivingdetection emulator as has been installed on F-series Bimmers and the i3 for a few years. When the coding gets figured out for the SE, it will enable 5AR Traffic Jam Assist as available on BMWs. Basically a very rudimentary driving assistant to help stay between the lane markers and away from the car ahead. Doing it for gits and shiggles more than any useful purpose. Lol
 
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Maybe I missed this...but *why* are you removing the airbag and horn?
In Europe it is auto start/stop follow + automatic lane centering...also known as poor man's autopilot (needs a vehicle to follow).

To enable this feature North America you need to emulate the hands off detection (have to touch steering wheel every 10 sec) and use the VO & FDL coding (aka E-Sys) to enable 5AR Traffic Jam Assist. The emulator needs to intercept the volume +/- module but you have to remove the airbag to access the wiring.
 
In Europe it is auto start/stop follow + automatic lane centering...also known as poor man's autopilot (needs a vehicle to follow).

To enable this feature North America you need to emulate the hands off detection (have to touch steering wheel every 10 sec) and use the VO & FDL coding (aka E-Sys) to enable 5AR Traffic Jam Assist. The emulator needs to intercept the volume +/- module but you have to remove the airbag to access the wiring.
“…very rudimentary…” lol
 
Window tint guy is coming to install the IR tints. Bonus We have BMW royalty in for service and A/C compressor replacement. It has a charge port light! 17A76AE7-528C-4237-9531-421235E375BE.webp94E41CCC-73B2-4D91-BAFF-F54396968D97.webp677F7E1F-1D78-416C-B364-1C01CA76E7D4.webp
 
Window tint guy is coming to install the IR tints.
:cool: It really does make a major difference if you don’t get to park under the tree. When I was walking out to my car in the middle of an asphalt parking lot last summer, I would start pre-cooling when I was three or four minutes away, and by the time I got to the car it was comfortable. Under full sun, I can still feel some heat, but then I open the window and start cooking and realize how effective it is.
 
:cool: It really does make a major difference if you don’t get to park under the tree. When I was walking out to my car in the middle of an asphalt parking lot last summer, I would start pre-cooling when I was three or four minutes away, and by the time I got to the car it was comfortable. Under full sun, I can still feel some heat, but then I open the window and start cooking and realize how effective it is.

what % did you go with ?
 
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