So I know people are just waiting on baited breath to hear the latest on my Mini Cooper, so I thought I'd give an update. About a week ago I sent in a very brief summary of my issues on the Mini web site. I did not expect to hear back.

On Monday (a holiday in the US) I got a call from the local dealership. I spoke with a tech who once again said the issue was probably "bad gas." He said this because my gas smelled bad. Errr.... ok. I've never heard of bad gas and I've been using the same few gas stations for years.

Anyway, the tech said he was going to purge the gas and drive it around a bit. I said that was fine, but to tell his boss I still wanted my money back.

Yesterday I got a call from Mini USA. I explained the situation to him. He asked if I had called a lawyer yet and I said I was planning on doing it later in the day. He said (obviously) that they would rather try to fix things w/o lawyers. He told me I should call my local dealer (Brian Harris of Baton Rouge). He was nice, but brought up the same old story the dealer had said that maybe I wasn't driving the car enough.

So anyway, when I mentioned that I wanted the money back, I was told that probably I wouldn't get 100% of it back because of depreciation. When I brought up the Louisiana Lemon law and that I thought it was clear in saying I would get 100% back, he told me he would call the dealer for me, which seemed like a change from his previous tone.

I did try to call a lawyer, but not many handle lemon law cases. I found one, but of course he wasn't in. I'm definitely going to try to reach him again on Monday though.