Brake lights Permanently stuck on.

I recently had a problem with my Mini Cooper where the brake lights stayed on constantly. When the ignition was on, the brake lights were on.
I went to my local mechanic who checked the wiring and did some other stuff to the car, but really, he didn't have the faintest idea what was wrong and suggested I take it to BMW.
Gee thanks!

So I phoned BMW who told me I would need to take my Mini Cooper in for a diagnostic report. That alone was going to cost me just short of £100. Once they found the fault they would repair it and charge me accordingly. Right! So I'd be looking at anything between £200 and £500 realistically.

I decided that there couldn't be that much wrong with the car so I did the obvious thing, and hit The Net. :-) And Guess what? There were a whole bunch of people with the same problem. "Brake lights constantly on", "brake lights won't turn off", "brake lights stuck on when car is on"... some even had the problem with brake lights still on even when the car was off.

Sadly, none of them had the answer I was looking for and many of them were talking about different makes and model of car. But eventually I found a forum where someone mentioned a tiny little part called a DIODE. Brilliant! (It's a spade connector for anyone who knows any kind of technical jargon - which I don't - but apparently it means you just have to shove it in. No soldering required). I wasn't sure it would work but BMW sold me one for under £10 so I thought I'd try my luck. Well actually, I thought I'd give it to someone else to try their luck, as I'm really not very clued up when it comes to fixing things. :-/

So here's what we had to do...

We removed the panel on the driver's side of the footwell. We think it's called the "sill". It was quite a tricky job which required small bendy hands and more than one pair was useful.

Inside were a whole load of very thin bunched up wires all tied together. (Sorry there are no other photos but I don't fancy pulling everything out again) :-) Somewhere amongst those wires was the broken diode. We had to look really hard for it and we missed it the first time round, but it was there. When we located it, we simply replaced it, closed everything up again and "voila"! the brake lights worked again.

So much cheaper than taking my car to the manufacturer. Now all I need to do is work out how to turn the airbag light off. :-/