Well, my Sunday afternoon was interrupted by a failure of my voltage regulator in the alternator that is the subject of the pending/current recall. Unfortunately, the dealers have not sent out notices and even worse, my 03 CL55's warning system does not give ample warning of battery failure, much less any real indication of the problem. The system just showed a red outlined battery with a notice that it was low and to "vist workshop", but no particular urgency was indicated. What is worse, is that after a few minutes, the warning went out and the car returned to normal. After driving another say 30 minutes, the sound went out and in quick succession warnings of failures in the ESP, ABC, BAS, etc. flashed on. I parked in a safe place and turned the car off. The batttery was so low it would not start and needed to be flatbedded to the dealer. They had no clue about the recall and dignosed the problem by trial and error after replacing the battery with a new one. Very disconcerting to say the least that they could not diagnose the problem with the computer.

This known problem was handled extremely poorly by MBUSA. You would think that with the recent surveys indicating quality control problems with MB's that the company would not simply hope that its good customers were not inconvenienced or worse, left in a very unsafe situation with a dead car on a busy highway. Very bad form MBUSA. Definitely not the way to get return business. BTW, the TeleAid people only get a C- from me. They shold put some energy behind their customer service efforts. Such a shame for an otherwise brilliantly designed and engineered automobile.

 

wow...

Friday night my car died on the highway. I was stuck on the side of the road for over 3 hours waiting for a tow in frigid cold with no heater. Hungry, tired, with trucks blowing past me at 90MPH. I call tele-aid 4 times and it does not work (the wrench button). I call from my cell and get a tow 3 hours later.

They told me today the car was out of gas. My fuel gauge showed 3/4 full. Turns out when they worked on the car they replaced a computer and forgot to "program" the gas guage. They also forgot to program tele aid.
It cost me 2 days of work, 4 days without my car, and a cold.

Before this the car was in the shop for 4 weeks (for the third time). Because I had electrical bugs and it was traced to a wrong battery, in a Certified Pre-Owned car with 17,000 miles. I guess they forgot to check the battery before they sold it.

When I bought it, they lost my owners manuals, keys, keyless go card, floormats, etc. It took 20 phone calls and 3 months to get them after an angry call to MBUSA... at one point the dealer told me the $80,000 used car is "as is".

Now they all beg me to fill out the survey and mark everything excellent. The salesman begs and says the only person it hurts, is him. That its not his fault but the dealer's. And that nothing will happen to the dealer.

The Service advisor seems like a nice guy.... but he says "unless its all excellent, it only hurts me. Please throw it away if you won't mark it all excellent". At both dealerships (purchase and service), they handed me "samples" of how I should fill the survey marked all "excellent".

I am a nice guy and I feel for these guys.... but this whole thing has me very frustrated. I am sitting here with these surveys in front of me and I don't know what to do. I feel for the little guy but then who is going to take the blame here?

 

I know a few models are under recall for the alternator problem. The CL & S Class were not one of the models listed, OR at least yet.

Keep us updated.

 

As of this afternoon the dealer has received no inforamtion about the voltage regulator recall. Although the recall may not apply to CL and S class cars and it may be purely coincidental that my voltage regulator failed, MB will need to recall well over one million cars. It may be that no recall has yet been issued because all of the replacement parts are not in place at dealerships. My service rep told me that they have not seen this problem on the CL before. I have 15,000 miles on the car since I got it in late March 2003 and have had no operational problems until this. I suppose that I should be relieved that it was not a short in the car that drained the battery, as that may have been very difficult to isolate and fix, given the apparent trial and error approach to dignosing and solving my particular problem.
The truly unfortunate part of the experience is the failure of the car's warning system to give a more urgent warning or to be more specific about the source of the problem. Althought he systems are complicated, electronic monitoring of modules/sub-systems should be relatively simple. Perhaps I should spend more time with the owner's manual.