My wife has been complaining of intermittent loss of power assist. I drive her car very little however I recently had the problem happen to me. One of my hobbies is sport car racing (most recently at summit point raceway in wv) so I do expect the unexpected however it is so intermittent it is often forgotten. It will be fine for weeks then it happens again. Thousands of reports in the uk and Canada issued a recall. You don't lose your steering just the assist. Next time you are alone on a back road with a curve turn your car off and you will see what the described problem feels like. Lets not have a serious incident before BMW resolves this issue. This has been going on for years.

- Yardley, PA, USA

Power steering failure--the power steering in my MINICooper S 2002 began "cutting out" and became more frequent over a few days. The "cutting out" happens without warning and is potentially quite dangerous as the vehicle becomes almost unmanageable when making a turn. This makes driving the vehicle very unsafe. Upon researching this problem, this is a very common problem which will eventually occur with most MINICoopers even through fairly recent years of manufacture and often at fairly low mileage accumulation.

- Highland, UT, USA