Theory of preserving air suspension
 

On my daily commute home ,from the office (~30 mi incase anyone was wondering), I had an interesting thought about reducing wear on my aging air suspension on my 05 e500, so I figure i would throw it out to you guys and get some feedback. So the goal is to use the suspension setting which would put the least amount of stress on the components, generally. My two main theories are as follows:
Keep the setting on comfort which would reduce wear caused through dampening, but increase the stroke and put stress on the air bags.

Second Theory:
Stiffen up the setting (on either sport 1 or 2) which would increase dampening wear but decrease stroke travel.

I could be totally pulling ***** out of my ass, so feel free to chime in and let me know your thoughts and reasoning :)

ps: my mind was "elevated" when i thought of this, so take that into consideration :)

The first thing you should do is not drive "elevated".

The second thing is that all of the above is nonsense. Enjoy the car and accept the finite lifespan of the parts that it is built with.

It will leak no matter what you do to it. lol!

I have a relative who is a mechanic at MB and leaking airbags are very common.

I would stay at work longer or or stay at home longer or quit your job or move closer to work or have my car towed to work and home---all of the these will help conserve you airbags---now if you live in a gun prone area and libel to have you airbags shot out that is a totally different matter.

As an after thought , If you can come up with USD5,000 I can design an "everlast" air bag!!The production start up costs and another issue----do you need the bags to last till 2050??

:y Retire park it they might last longer.

lilbenz, i appreciate your willingness to post, but i was not looking for parental guidance. I have enjoyed every second with my car and I dont mind replacing worn or broken parts. My objective was to be as gentle as possible to my old lady.

Lol guys i realize that the airbags will eventually leak and the shocks will eventually go too, but thats not what I am concerned about. My e5 is no longer the young, nimble, maiden that she once was and I am perfectly okay with that. If I have catastrophic suspension failure, I would just go with springs and shocks, more likely coilovers and shocks. I just wanted some input on my theories :)

I used to think along these lines of running it in comfort mode would put less stress on everything with less rigidity and such, so I definitely see your logic. But the others are right, even though my car is always in sport mode and sport II these days, I've had about the same number of AirMatic-related failures in both modes. Not to say this should be a causation or correlation study or have any statistical significance (let me gather some data from owners and do a 2 sample t-test shall we?), but it really doesn't matter in the end. I almost feel I have a few more squeaks and noises now that I've run it in a stiffer setting, though it's likely just the age and mileage of the car and all in my head.

The parts get worn, the rubber gets old, and we have what I had happen to me today - blown air bags. Just a fact of life. Interesting post though. I guess not driving my car like a total a-hole every day would probably help but I'm just to addicted to the roaring V8 and exhaust note, so I just make sure to keep up on all of my maintenance and install only the best quality parts so I can enjoy the girl until she is all used up ;)

157,000 miles on 04 E500. No airbag issues at all.

Matter of when not if. Either you have really great roads where you live, or you're about to have a really expensive repair bill lol. Air suspension is just like normal struts, it wears out after time.

Air suspension
 

You're right about the roads. I live in Florida and this car has never been north of Charlotte. Grew up in Boston, aka The pothole capital of the world!