Although changing a battery is fairly minor as car maintenance goes, there's enough extra to it in the Countryman that I thought I'd put up a few notes about it since there was not a lot of user reports online. The brief summary is that I had only one min issue in replacement, and everything works well after.

To replace the battery, you have to remove not just a cover door, but also a pretty substantial piece of molding, and also the right (looking out) windshield wiper.
My Countryman is a 2011 model, but it really didn't vary much at all from a video I found here detailing how to get the battery in and out:

http://www.carcarekiosk.com/video/20...eplace_battery

My thoughts after the repair:

The reason you have to take off the wiper blade is to get the molding off, so you may as well do that first while the hood is still closed.

You only need 10mm and 15mm sockets for the whole job,

The molding took a bit of force to pull out because there are tabs along the song edge (not mentioned in the video) you need to pull out before the bolding will slide out... you have to pull up the front edge first soy can slide it out and to the right of you to get out from under the corner. You put it back in in reverse, sliding it into the corner first and then making sure the tabs slot back in place - I managed to break one of mine but it didn't seem to affect stability of the overall cover much.

In the video they cleaned a lot of corrosion from around the battery but here nearly five years after I got my car there was absolutely zero corrosion, so don't worry about the baking soda cleanse or the battery terminal corrosion prevention spray they applied (unless you find corrosion, perhaps battery corrosion is much worse in humidity or near the ocean).

The video also talks about a "Battery Minder" to keep your car from losing settings as the battery is disconnected, and I had read some reports of people possibly having to enter a radio code? So far though I've had to do none of that - I did have to re-enter the date/time, but my custom car settings (for the door locks) and my garage door codes for the comfort access buttons in the mirror were all still there and working fine.

In the video it looked like the bracket holding down the battery might be on the side? I may have been mistaken, because in my 2011 countryman it was in front of the battery , help in place by a very nicely accessible long bolt that came level with the top of the battery. Thank you MINI for not burying that down at the base.

While you are taking the battery out and putting the new one in, try folding all of the cables off to the right of the battery to get them fully out of the way - otherwise the positive/red terminal will interfere.

I also got a battery through Advance auto parts instead of MINI, we'll see how that works out long term but the battery seemed to be a nearly identical fit and is working fine. The battery looked very similar to the one I used to have in my older Cooper S, though the Countryman battery is in the engine not the boot...

 

No IBS ? Didn't require battery registration?

 

Pretty sure the IBS is integrated into the battery cable, I had read that "rough handling" could damage it but nothing in the cable setup seemed all that delicate... I'm pretty sure if I had messed up the IBS I'd get a warning, I was getting "battery charge warning" a number of times before I replaced the battery but the warnings are gone now.

It did not require battery registration that I could tell, both the MINI battery and the new one seemed like plain batteries, pretty sure all of the intelligence is in the parts attached to the battery.

 

yes, if it has IBS look at the cable:

https://www.northamericanmotoring.co...mpossible.html

 

I'm pretty sure it has IBS based on the cable image. But from the discussion you linked to:

"It is real. For whatever reason, the car with the IBS seems to need to know the capacity and size and such of the battery."

Well then, since the capacity and size of the new battery are pretty much identical to the old one - why would it matter if the IBS were reset or not? Even if it thinks it has the old battery the charging parameters should be very much the same.

It also makes little sense to me electronically, since any system connected to the battery can easily tell when a battery is full to stop charging, and in fact must have that safeguard in place in case the battery has some kind of failure...

Also "shorten battery life" can mean a lot of things. Is it a month shorter? A year? Again, even if the IBS did have to know exactly the capacity and size of a battery if the attributes were similar (which it has to be since the battery fits in a very specific space) then the battery life difference would I think be so negligible as to make no difference, or to the point where it would cost more in gas to go to the dealer than I will lose in battery life by not "registering the battery".

I'm happy to keep running the car without battery registration in order to see just what kind of effect it has... so far the car is fine, and the computer is not having any issues. Car engine response feels normal too.

 

Its a countdown for the alternator per the life of the battery, as it get older it has to charge more. So the computer regulates this.

 

If true, it is crazy. A battery in my car in Oregon ages differently than one in Alaska, so if they were the same age and similar mileage why would the system want to charge both batteries more. I would think modern electronics should be designed to figure out how much juice to provide. I will be forever suspicious of the motivation of Mini/BMW on this one.

 

Think it all steams back to emissions or something, that what I heard once from MINI Corp internals once.

 

Interesting, but I still don't see why automatic safeguards would not kick in if it attempted to overcharge the battery. Also what happens after eight or more years without resetting the system? Surely there's some kind of maximum amount of extra time it devotes to charging the battery, rather than an endlessly increasing amount...

 

Yea, there has to be a max point on time. And there has to be a charge level.

 

Grrrrr.... changed out the battery on my 2011 Countryman this weekend and now i have no signal lights, no door chimes, no interior lights and the dash code with the car up on the hoist (in red) is showing. I'm assuming this means a trip to the dealer.....


Update.... Battery initialization failed and the Dealer diagnosed the issue as a failed FRM module that cause the battery to drain along with a failure of the front brake sensor. Replacement of parts and a hard system re-set required. $1500 Cdn later......