How far to your MINI dealer?

Regular readers will no doubt be aware that my local dealership, MINI Peabody, is not very far from me (20 minutes drive).
But recently, I shipped a MINI circuit to Anthony, and his Alaska zip code made me wonder how far away his dealership was – so I asked him …
The nearest dealer is in Tacoma, WA, about 2300 miles (by road). I bought my MINI from Momentum MINI in Houston, TX.
… there aren’t many MINI’s here in Alaska. Here in Anchorage, I have seen 8 different color combos myself, and have had friends report another 2 that I haven’t seen. Could be more than one of each color combo, so I don’t really know how many there are. The Owner Directory at http://www.miniusa.com lists 10 of us in Alaska, but 4 of those
aren’t near Anchorage and one is mine.
Of course, being one of a very few is part of the fun. When I was driving it up from Houston a few weeks ago, nobody really paid much attention to it, but once I got it here, I’ve gotten lots of comments!

My MINI circuit sales map also shows where MINI dealerships are located, but unfortunately it does not include Alaska in the map (a limitation of TIGER Map, it seems)
Definitely a couple of MINI circuit “dots” a long way from a dealership – but none can be as far as Anthony!
So if you think it is a long way to the dealership, just be glad you aren’t in Alaska 😉

USA: 100,000 MINIs soon!

Decembers MINI sales were announced today:


Decembers total sales was 3,810, with 3,363 in November; the total sold in USA is just 3,368 shy of 100,000! So will the total break 100,000 in January? We will see …

Meantime, with 4,637 Convertibles in USA, they are becoming much more “common” – almost 5% of MINIs are now convertible 🙂

A new skilled MINI developer!

In the past, I have developed the MINI circuit and some iBus protocol things including the HKenabler and a circuit to send MFSW button signals to an iPod remote.
More recently Dension has been developing an ICElink Plus which allows an iPod to be connected to the MINI stereo, controlled from the MFSW and (promised for one day) track info displayed on the head unit. Unfortunately, there have been some early problems.
Today, David Broome (who I have chatted via the Yahoo HackTheiBus forum) announces success with displaying text on the MINI stock radio:


Read more about it here on MINI2 or here on Davids web site