RDVT4ME

Was driving home yesterday and the transmission started acting strange. It appears as if it was stuck in 4th gear. When I started from a stop, it had no power and never shiftted. If I manually shifted (it's an automatic), it would show going to 3rd, then 2nd then 1st but actually never shifted. When I got home I put it in park, then back to drive and it clunked very hard. Went to reverse, same hard clunk.

Parked car, then came back later to drive it to the dealer and everything worked fine. Drove around and it still works fine. Drove to work today and everything is fine.

Any thoughts?

Car has 39K, It's a 2006 C230.

Glyn M Ruck

Something caused it to go into limp home mode. Stopping & restarting the car rebooted the microprocessor in the TCU/TCM and all was well. Sometimes these things happen & never occur again. Make sure you have no codes. Check for fluid leaks. Make sure the fluid level is correct. Then just keep an eye on it for a while. Could well be nothing to worry about. A number of us have had similar single incidents of this, never to occur again. Sticking the car in reverse while rolling forward can cause this but that was not the case here. It's all done as a protection mechanism.

RDVT4ME

Thanks! that does make sense.

Glyn M Ruck

Yep! the clunks are also typical of limp mode.

RDVT4ME

An update on this problem.

Happened 2 more times within a couple of weeks. Took the car in for A service and they found the problem. Valve body needs to be replaced. They are flying the part in from Germany.

On the plus side, I now have a beautiful red C-class loaner until my car is fixed. Also got the 40K transmission service for free as part of this repair....sometimes you just get lucky.

Glyn M Ruck

So it was going into limp mode but with more sinister things underlying the problem. Sorry to hear that - hardly a common problem. Hence no spare parts. Hope you get your car back soon fully repaired. These things happen but it looks as though they are looking after you properly.

joaks1967

The EXACT same thing has happened to me, probably every other day for the past two weeks! The car seems to "clunk" a bit, then it gets stuck in 2nd gear. If I completely power the car off, then start it back up again, it's like nothing ever happened. I have a GL 450, with almost 40K miles. It has happened while I was towing a trailer and then my worst fear was realized when I pulled onto the freeway and couldn't go faster than 25 mph! When I took it in for the service, right away they knew that it was the valve body that needed to be replaced, no questions asked. Kind of frustrating but at least the dealership is handling the situation.

joaks1967

how many miles did you have on your car when this happened to you?

RDVT4ME

39,000