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For the MINI, the first service starts counting at 10,000 miles and goes down from there. They base the actual countown on fuel usage or some other calculation, but for most people it ends up coming between 10k and 11k actual miles.
Then the clock is reset and serivce 2 starts counting at 15000 and does the same. Seems like most of the time it ends up being close to 17k.
On MINI sites (and I am sure at BMW sites also) plenty of people have had their oil tested by Blackstone (I think that is the name of the company) at multiple intervals and I have never seen anyone's test come back as bad oil even at the end of the MINI/BMW recommended interval. In fact, they usually say that the oil is OK for continued use, but that more frequent monitoring is needed to determine when to truly change it, even for the first change with the oil from break in still there.
That being said, since I drive a little less than 10k miles per year and have not actually been testing my own oil, I changed mine halfway last time (when the countdown got to 7500, which was closer to 8500 actual miles on the oil) and plan on doing it again as cheap insurance. I have seen others talk online of doing it every 3, 4, 5k miles, but think that is probably overkill based on actual oil test results on similar cars.
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