What did you do to your MINI today?

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.

 

YMMV lol

 

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.



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!).



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

 

“…very rudimentary…” lol

 

Thanks! For the life of me I couldn’t remember what the “d” was for, though I knew it as recently as three days ago! Second thing to go, I guess…

 

Whaaaat?

 

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.