For You Mercedes Guys

[Zee09]

My rump needs those seats...
Great car..

 

[john_pifer]

My rump needs those seats...
Great car..

They are very overstuffed!

Japanese car seats, they are not.

 

[Wolf359]

The traction control on my 2000 BMW 528i failed, followed shortly thereafter by dash lights for Brakes and ABS (though the brakes still worked fine) followed by the speedometer/odometer only working for the first part of my morning and afternoon commutes. A well known local BMW specialist repair place quoted me a couple thousand dollars for a repair. I did some reading and found out that a failed ABS module can do most of what was happening. Had my old module rebuilt for a couple hundred dollars, replaced it myself and all the problems resolved.

It worked out well but I had to do the leg work myself. I suppose the repair place would have fixed it too but for a big price.

The point being that you might have to do some of the work if you want to keep an older car and not break the bank.

PS The person who did the quote was no longer working at the repair place (a couple of months later) when I was in for some other issue and told them about my experience. It sounded as though they had figured out that he was either not that good at his job or not in tune with their philosophy. Either way he no longer worked there.

They all seem to be tied together. Mine was a warning that the stability control wasn't working and cruise control was disabled as part of it. Needed a good scanner to figure out exactly what was causing it. The forums are greater for this stuff, the usual causes were either a bad wheel speed sensor, magnetic ring, yaw sensor or the steering angle sensor. Steering angle sensor going bad was very common. Part was only about $150 at the time and I think I paid less than $100 to have it installed which required taking the steering wheel apart. That's what's great about mercedes, they have EPC and WIS which is their parts catalog so you can look up the exact part for your car and just do a google search for that part number. WIS tells you exactly how to do the repair and the tools you need. But there was a youtube video so didn't even need to bother with that. There's knock off copies on eBay so you get both for about $10. Typical dealer charge to do the work was about $600 so mine was about 1/3 of that. I picked up a Launch scanner for $30 years ago when they were first introduced and it did all MB specific codes so it was well worth it. They've have some new models out now, Thinkcar Pro that's in the $40-$60 range now still.

 

[Jetronic]

Doesn't Mercedes have the ability to make parts for old models as they still have all the molds, stamps/dies...?

Only S and SL if I recall correctly

 

[930.engineering]

Not a Mercedes guy but that one's a beauty!