McGuireV10

Well, that didn't take long. A week and a half of ownership, and there I am standing at the grocery store with a handful of groceries and an E500 that won't respond to the remote. Attempts to point the remote's IR sender at the receiver on the handle also failed to unlock the car.

I pulled out the metal key and unlocked the car. Upon opening the door, the alarm went off and the door cleverly locked itself again -- but it was partially open. And now the metal key wouldn't unlock it either. Since the door was partially open (and I was standing next to a wailing alarm looking confused and annoyed), I gave it a good yank and it came open all the way, allowing me to use the key in the ignition switch to turn off the alarm.

At that point the remote locks all seemed to work fine -- except that when I tried to close the door to drive away, I discovered the door latch on the driver's door was stuck in a closed position. I fiddled with it in the parking lot for awhile, but it just wasn't working right. It was getting dark and I wasn't going to accomplish anything in the parking lot.

The store was close to home, so I drove it up the street holding the door closed, where I could get it into the garage and get some light on the problem. Turns out the metal latch is covered by a plastic sleeve, and I'm guessing when I yanked the door open, I somehow deformed that plastic. I trimmed some of the plastic off to allow the latch to open fully, and it appeared to work. Several repeated open/closes went without a problem.

Then this morning I jumped in the car to go to work, and once again the latch was stuck. Our local dealer isn't open on Sundays which is why I haven't contacted them yet, but I suppose I'll send it into the shop and hopefully they can just replace the latch assembly.

Given what I've read here, I can't imagine they'll even try to diagnose the original remote-unlock failure.

I suppose I'll also nag them about the infamous pulls-to-the-right issue while it's in the shop.