So, my rain sensor failed months ago. I know exactly when and why it failed. I went to the store in the very late fall maybe 1.5-2 hours before sunset. I had my car facing towards the south/southwest, and I’m pretty sure that the rain sensor got fried due to the angle of the sun (lucky me!). You really almost have to AIM to get this to happen, but there it was. How did I know that it happened then? I almost always drive around in position 1 (high sensitivity automatic wipers), and they “went off” immediately when I started for home. They behaved as though there was a mist although the weather was clear. SO, I drove in position 0 and manually operated the wipers as needed all winter. Auto lighting, however, continued to work.

So, I lived with this until last week. I looked into getting a new rain sensor. I looked up my car in the WIS and the rain/lighting part # was A2079013700 (for my exact VIN 2013 US 4MATIC E350 sedan). I wanted to buy a new one, not a used one. I contacted my supplier (a well known Euro supplier in the US) and told them that their website claimed that my car did not use this part. They looked it up themselves land they understood that it actually did, so they sent it.

I got the part, and I pulled the old one out after confirming that it had an electrical fault which showed up in the quicktest of Xentry (with Openport). This was fairly easy to do with trim tools. To my surprise, the P/N I was replacing was A2079012200. Apparently (?) this part was superseded by the -3700 part (?). No problem, or so I thought, I’ll install it. These parts are seemingly physically identical except for the label. But that doesn't make them identical!

So, I installed the new -3700 part and hooked up Xentry thinking that I would need to calibrate it. To my surprise, I could not find where to calibrate the part. Even worse, the car now reported in the instrument cluster that automatic lighting was INOP (the lights were stuck on when the car was in “auto”). The rain sensor, however, worked fine.

I finally found the sensor in Xentry, and the part claimed to have been “calibrated” for RAIN and LIGHTING, but not CODED. Xentry wanted me to do online SCN. Obviously, I wasn’t going to be able to do that. Now I NEVER deliberately calibrated lighting or rain sensing for this new part. I never even saw any place to calibrate it. I have read that once calibrated, you never get a chance to do it again - don’t know how true that is, and doing voodoo like virginizing, etc. is quite beyond me at the moment.

So, I mulled things over. I ordered a used -2200 sensor on an auction website. I installed that this afternoon and the part worked, no calibration, worked fine for lighting and for rain sensing. All good again!

So, what exactly happened? I don’t really know. I have considered that some previous customer may have previously messed with the new “-3700” part (the box wasn’t sealed, don't know if it should have been), and left it in this state when it was returned to the supplier. HOWEVER, I cannot prove any of this.

In any event, replacing the part with the EXACT SAME PART # (-2200), USED, from a working car, worked fine for me with no calibration or coding. YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY. AND THE COLOR OF YOUR WINDSHIELD MIGHT MATTER. It is possible that the -3700 part COULD work to replace the -2200 part, but it MIGHT require SCN coding. Looks like I have a "spare" now, so it this ever happens again (better not), I may be able to have the 3700 part coded by a larger indy locally so that I can salvage my 80 clams although it probably wouldn't be worth it.

MAN. Is ANYTHING easy with this car?

 

Congrats on identifying your windshield sensor had failed.
You wondered about something easy in this car... soldering loose oxidized pins saves time with absolutely no coding.

The next troublesome modules are KeylessGo and EIS.

They are responsible goofy keyless operation and batteries "drained by parking".

 

I've actually been quite impressed with how easy things have been with mine (11 E550). I had a BMW 5-Series Wagon before, and EVERYTHING required a stupid amount of poking around on a dedicated laptop. Extremely frustrating from someone who is far more adept at jetting carburetors and setting spring rates in distributors. I replaced the windshield on the E550 a few years back, and didn't bother with calibration. It didn't blink. I just shotgunned almost the entire air suspension system, and I only really used the scanner to reset the pump counter (seems optional) and to actuate things to make sure they were working (for sure optional). I'm about to really put the theory to the test and replace the active suspension computer (internal short). Need a weekend day without a kid birthday party, or 5" of snow, or who knows what the next obstacle will be. If that goes as smoothly as my research suggests it might, I'm officially won over to the Mercedes bandwagon.

I'll never touch an Audi because the engineering is just so bad to the point of being actively hostile to the end user. I'm pretty much over BMW; the new ones require subscriptions for everything, before that they require an elaborate computer setup to wash the windows, and before that... Before that they're OK again, but probably older than I'll be dealing with going forward without being old enough to be worth dealing with. This is my first Mercedes. I rarely keep a car long enough to renew the plates, and this will be only the second car to make it that long in a long time. I'm not bored with it yet though. Not at all. I actively prefer driving it most days, and as long as the computer replacement doesn't put up too much of a fight, I think it'll continue leading the fleet until something happens to it... Or something better comes along, but the bar is pretty high right now, and it's the bleeding edge of acceptable modernity for me.

 

@spectre6000
Do you want to troubleshoot your active suspensions computer ??
That's with magnetic dampeners right? Not the Airmatic ?
I've never seen its circuit board... do you have the wiring diagram to see how things are connected?

 

Op , you may be referring to my post where I had one chance at calibration. The New part I bought was coded. It listed the options of the car in the sensor information for sale. The not calibrated code for me was choosing the correct color of glass (parametrization). Once that was chosen, it was locked in, and I can not change without recoding.

Coding example on this page.

Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG Wagon (2012-13) Note: For cars with (Code 238, 266, 269, 271, 476, 513, 608, 610, 628, 863, or 865)

https://www.pelicanparts.com/More_In...Ayu1x0Vu6XMwT8

and another

https://www.rmeuropean.com/Products/...bm64qrMbGVt7k-