AlanInSitges
New Member
I've been through this too and can hopefully add some useful information. This is based on personal experience and talking to two different techs who worked on the display and car.
There is a fan inside the instrument cluster that fails. This causes the temperature of <not sure what part> to rise too far and the PSU in the cluster shuts it off. The solution from Mini is to replace the cluster. It is possible to replace the fan and restore normal operation. This has supposedly been done to the unit from my car but I haven't been able to get it swapped back in yet because the guy I bought it from is super flakey.
Meanwhile If you buy a cluster from a third party, it will throw all kinds of errors when installed in the car because it has to be programmed and this can only be done by a Mini dealer. Mine charged me 65€ to program it, took about an hour. It now works correctly except for one tiny problem: when a Mini dealer connects to the car for service, it shows as an unauthorized component in the car and all the car's service history is gone. Mine shows 16,000,000 km in the dealer's computer. It won't get any more updates or campaigns. Evidently those clusters have to be married to the car's VIN by the factory so those third-party/used clusters aren't ever going to work right.
It's a huge mess. Hopefully I'll get my repaired, original cluster swapped back in soon and can report if that really solved the problem.
There is a fan inside the instrument cluster that fails. This causes the temperature of <not sure what part> to rise too far and the PSU in the cluster shuts it off. The solution from Mini is to replace the cluster. It is possible to replace the fan and restore normal operation. This has supposedly been done to the unit from my car but I haven't been able to get it swapped back in yet because the guy I bought it from is super flakey.
Meanwhile If you buy a cluster from a third party, it will throw all kinds of errors when installed in the car because it has to be programmed and this can only be done by a Mini dealer. Mine charged me 65€ to program it, took about an hour. It now works correctly except for one tiny problem: when a Mini dealer connects to the car for service, it shows as an unauthorized component in the car and all the car's service history is gone. Mine shows 16,000,000 km in the dealer's computer. It won't get any more updates or campaigns. Evidently those clusters have to be married to the car's VIN by the factory so those third-party/used clusters aren't ever going to work right.
It's a huge mess. Hopefully I'll get my repaired, original cluster swapped back in soon and can report if that really solved the problem.