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.