AUTONEWS

NHTSA: Mini Cooper SE electric cars sold in the US may catch fire for no apparent reason due to serious battery problem

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is the US authority that oversees the safety of vehicles sold in the US for their owners, informing the public whenever there is a possibility that a particular model may endanger its driver, its occupants or other vehicles with which it shares the public road. And the NHTSA requires manufacturers, under penalty of millions in fines, to report as quickly as possible any defects that may endanger their vehicles. Through this public information, the NHTSA has already announced to American drivers that Mini Cooper SEs, manufactured between 2020 and 2024, have a serious problem with their batteries, which can start to burn for no apparent reason.

In addition to the 12,535 Cooper SE units equipped with defective batteries sold in the US, there are many other vehicles sold around the world. Starting in Europe, this affects a total of 140,000 units equipped with batteries that could start to burn due to a short circuit caused by construction problems. Mini itself is the first to acknowledge that the problems are specific to the high-voltage battery and could be caused by several reasons. Since BMW does not produce the cells used to form the battery packs, which are purchased from Chinese manufacturers to be cheaper, Mini, a manufacturer of the BMW group, admits that there is a thermal runaway problem that could cause a fire.

There is a possibility that the fire could occur even when the electric Mini is parked, without being recharged, which is why BMW North America, unlike its European counterpart, has publicly admitted that it began investigating the problem after a fire case registered in October 2023, and in January 2024 a new fire occurred in Germany.

Mini believes that it can control the problem with a software update, although thermal runaway cases are not often resolved in this way. However, as the brand is unable to perform remote updates (over-the-air) capable of altering the battery management programming, it will warn customers about the need to visit the workshop and update the software there. According to the manufacturer, this will include a diagnostic function that should detect problems in the battery when the charge is below 30%. The update is (obviously) free of charge, as it is a construction defect, with the brand informing customers from October 7th, this being in the USA. 

Of the 140,000 problematic units of the Mini Cooper SE electric manufactured, according to Reuters, 12,535 were sold in the USA and around 39 thousand in Germany, with the sales volume in the rest of Europe and specifically in Portugal not being known. In the USA, customers will start to be informed within a month, but there is no information on when national (or European) drivers will be subject to the same treatment. To be sure, the best thing to do is to contact the brand's importer for our country and find out the best way to resolve any deficiencies in the battery, which could cause it to burn out inadvertently.

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