ebowman

Hi,

I've been searching the web for a single cause to my drivers side door soft close failing then my battery draining and finally my door lock failing (I believe in that order but I may not have noticed the door lock issue until after the battery drain).

By, "my door lock failing", I mean that when I use my key remote and press the lock button three door locks "lock" while the drivers lock simple wiggles a bit seemingly not getting enough "suction" to pull the lock down.

I've just started trouble shooting so I jumped the car, drive it for a few minutes and now I've pulled the 15 AMP fuse that appears to control the remote locking, windows, doors etc. By tomorrow morning I should be able to determine if the battery drain was caused by something related to that fuse and thus something in the drivers door or the "pse pump".

With that said, does anyone else have any suggestions or solutions to the above described problem?

Thanks,
Erik

wallyp

This could be two separate problems.


On the door lock actuation, leaks are possible anywhere in the system, but the most common failure is the plastic pneumatic lock actuator buried in the lock mechanism. If that is the problem, replacement of the lock mechanism is the only practical answer. It is expensive, so do some careful testing first...

ebowman

The 15 AMP fuse has been out for 10 hours and the car still starts. Maybe it needed longer to drain? Now I'll try returning the 15 AMP and removing the 20 AMP fuse (the one next to the 15 AMP that controls the the soft close).

ebowman

I think I have at least a few more cycles of testing to go through before I take it to my local indie. I was also thinking of hitting up a local dealer to have them diagnose with the Star system. Any ideas if the Star system will identify all the issues?

wallyp

My limited experience with two cars is that the first time that you run the diagnostics after a year or two of operation, you will see twenty or thirty failure codes, with most of them being stored (as opposed to current) failures. The person running the diagnostics has to figure out which codes are real failures that require repairs, and which are codes from random events that can just be erased. It gets complicated...

tusabes

When there is a vacuum leak the pse pump goes into protection mode to stop overrunning and save itself , pulling the fuse and reinstalling will reset it, but without fixing the underlying problem you'll burn out your $1000 pse pump

bha

Agreed. I run a DAS simple test on each of my 3 MB's every year. Invariably it always comes up with 10+ codes each car.

I find the best thing to do with stored codes is record them all, erase them, then check again in a month.

Low voltage (either letting the battery die, or removing it for winter storage of the car) will trigger a bunch of codes. Every module will report some kind of failure when the battery gets low and the modules start to flake out because they don't have enough battery voltage to run them.

Delete the codes and see what keeps coming back.

davesavop

Hi Erik,

I just had the exact same issue on my 2004 S55, and the repair is not cheap. At first I thought it was just a dead battery. I noticed that only 3 of 4 locks were locking, and the soft door close stopped altogether. And finally, my trunk was not functioning properly (auto trunk runs partially on air pump). Long story short - the door lock that was not locking had a leak, which caused the air pump to burn up over time. I think it was staying on and just ran down the battery (not really sure, but symptom is the same as yours). Anyway, my local shop could not fix it due to codes and such, so the dealer got the car. I think there was another pump in the door or a servo / actuator that was also bad. They replaced air pump, vacuum lines that were leaking, the servo or connection in the door, and checked the system again for vacuum integrity. The whole deal cost me $1950.00, and that was after they gave me the air pump at dealer cost (replaced it twice before and out of warrantee again). Sorry for the bad news, but it's better that you at least have an answer. Best of luck!

David

davesavop

Perhaps if you have caught it early enough, your pump is still working and they can just repair your vacuum leaks. I hope your luck is better than mine!

David