here'a story for you. i'm on a relaxing saturday drive, (relaxing to me is putting myla to the max, mind you) and she breaks on me. not only is she undrivable, but my cell-phone battery dies (thankfully) right after i get a hold of the towing company. so here's what's wrong with her. with the engine off, and clutch disengaged (pedal to the floor) the stick will go into 1-5 and reverse fine. with the engine on, it will do the same, no problem. however, once i start to go in 1st gear, with a little manipulation between the clutch and the gas, it will only go about 20 mph. if i try to shift into any other gear while the car is in motion, all i get is gear grinding, and no gear placement other than neutral. all i ask is a little insight before i go replacing parts, which will be expensive, let alone the $300.00 i had to pay to get it towed home. and to top it off, when i got home, i found my cell phone to be broken as well, and will only display a screen of white.

 

I had a Jaguar that did that to me on I-195 in the middle of winter. The computer put my Jag into a "safe crawl mode" not able to go faster than 20 mph. Many European cars have this fail safe system.

Turned out it was a problem with my braking system, it was detected by the car's computer and immediately reduced my engine power and put it into "crawl mode." Supposedly this allows the driver to get off the road safely and w/o causing further damage.

When I would put it into other gears, it would grind.

I was told that sometimes you can bypass that by just shutting the car off and restarting after a few minutes, the dealer can get the code later on.

In my case, I was still under factory warranty, so not taking any risks Jaguar of Hanover MA flat bedded my car some 60 miles to their dealership.

Not sure if this is what happend to you, but sounds like it to me.

 

not sure if that's the problem. i just replaced my brake pads, and rotors about two months ago. but i'll try re-starting it and driving it down the street a little to see if that is it. i've never heard anything like this about minis, but thanks for the input.

 

Is it difficult to get it into 1st with the engine on? If it is the clutch, then it would usually be 1 of 2 things. Either the clutch is not fully disengaging or it is slipping under power. If it is slipping, then that would not cause any difficulty in shifting.

Try putting it in 1st or even 2nd with the car off. Then start the car with it in gear. Do this on a flat surface and see if the car creeps when you start it while keeping the clutch in all the way. If the car creeps when you start it, then your clutch is still partially engaged with the pedal all the way down. The first thing to change would be the clutch master and slave cylinder. That is about $100 in parts.

As for not being able to go over 20mph, I think we need more info. Is the engine bogging down? Or is the engine revving with it in gear and going nowhere? Is there any clanking or strange sounds?

How many miles are on your car? I ask because you have an 03 MC and with that comes a crappy midlands transmission which will sometimes fail around 50k miles. Hopefully it is not the transmission though...

 

it's as easy as ever for it to go into any gear with the engine running. as for starting it while it's in gear,and the clutch disengaged, it does creep foward about an inch and stops. i can rev it to the red line with the cluth pedal out, and tranny in gear, and it just creeps along slowly. there aren't any strange sounds that i can hear, but the stick does feel looser and sloppier going in and out of gears. she has about 65k

 

Try putting it in 2nd or 3rd gear with the car on and try to go forward. If you can basically just rev the engine and barely go anywhere with the clutch fully engaged, you are burning up the clutch. Rev the engine in gear with the clutch engaged a few times then open the hood and let us know if you smell any burning clutch smell. If the clutch is slipping that much, then you should smell it from inside the car. If you are free revving the engine while in gear with the clutch pedal all the way out, meaning engaged, and you don't smell anything, then my bet would be on the tranny. It sounds to me like the clutch is slipping a lot though because the car is creeping when in gear while you are revving it. This sounds like the clutch just doesn't have much friction left. If you had something broken in your tranny that bad, you would probably hear some grinding or clanking or other strange noises.

 

Hmm, scratching my head on this, but I think it may be the clutch.

+1 with what ACW suggested, try to see if you can get going in 2nd or 3rd. If you do and the motor still just revs without going anywhere, the clutch is toast or the pressure plate/flywheel surfaces are burnt out. Incidentally, if you drive your car hard often, and you have the flywheel recall issue (I did in my 05), 65k is about right for the lifespan of the clutch. Mine had 1mm left at 40k miles (not driven by me).

The fact your car revs but doen't move much definitely suggests clutch.

Do make sure that when you do replace the clutch, you also replace the throwout bearing, inspect the slave cylinder for proper operation (another common failure point) and also inspect and replace if needed the pivot and fork... I heard those can cause problems too. On mine, since I had a bad flywheel, they also replaced it and the shifter cables (shifter was very stiff). Wouldn't hurt to replace as much as you can, the labor to split the tranny is what kills you financially.

On mine, the total job was around $2600 at the MINI dealer, but luckily I was under warranty so it was all covered. I would expect an import shop to be much less though.