What a joke! I would avoid MB wheels!
 

Have my car in for service- a trio of minor things, and I thought an unbalanced tire.

They are telling me ALL 4 rims are bent. Either BS, or MB just sucks at wheels. I didn’t like these 19 inches with RFT to begin with and quickly swapped them off for a winter wheel set.


So disappointed in MB right now.

I had an Audi a while back and bent all the rims. I had other issues with the car and didn’t want to put another dollar into it. I was filling up the tires once a month to keep pressure.

What are you driving over to bend them? I had hit a few things, my bends were definitely my fault. I drove the car rough and didn’t baby it one bit. Probably wouldn’t have had all the problems if I was more careful lol :hammer:

I have to wonder if RFTs have anything to do with all the reports of bent rims. It's conceivable that the very stiff sidewalks of such tires might transmit more shock to the rims, perhaps enough to distort them.

Well, a typical 245 wide MB tire on a 19" rim with 35 aspect ratio is VERY thin. Sometime I wonder why would OEM choose such a fragile combination for global market.
If all roads are like autobahn, we then be smiling. I don't know what wheel brand is on yours, but I am on a Ronal-AMG standard from MB and it is light, supposedly no more than 10kg.
https://www.ronalgroup.com/en/techno...ght-reduction/
Light weight is good, but off road type wheel strength we all wish for, would need a thicker aluminum alloy and that is weight penalty.
Our car own fat 1,800kg-ish weight is not helping either, the heavier the car, the more the impact the wheel experience on the same pot hole compared to a 1,350kg car at the same speed.
RTF effect, I have no idea. I got this used car with Bridgestone RE050 which I think it was RTF. Only use it like 100KM and replaced it with Michelin PS4 due to the tire was 4 years old, albeit 10,000KM only. So I can't say RTF was more harsh or not, besides this is an 18", so more forgiving I suppose.

245/40/18 tire wall height 9.9cm , total tire height 65.3 cm

I am lucky to be still in this 18" wheel size, being a 2014 car. But my rear 265/35 size, wall height only 9.4cm
245/35/19 tire wall height 8.6cm, total tire height 65.5 cm
1.3 cm worth of extra wall height "bent-wheel-buffer" on 18" wheel vs 19".
https://tiresize.com/calculator/

Here is a very interesting test, but on a Golf GTi size/weight 17,18,19 inch wheels, 225 wide tire. In case handling is your concern when and if going for 18"

225/45 17" 10.2cm wall height. Total tire height 63.5 cm
225/40 18" 8.9cm wall height. Total tire height 63.8 cm
225/35 19" 7.9cm wall height. Total tire height 64.0 cm

.

Yep, my car still has a couple bent rims on the rear. I think the fronts are ok. I had them balanced at town fair tire and that seemed to help out a little bit, but just took a trip yesterday to CT and still have that nagging rear end vibration on the highway, very frustrating. I guess I'll be at Viti soon too. I'd deal with wheel guy direct, a company called ARG but I tried that before and he only seems to want to deal direct with the dealers. I'm very familiar with these mercedes wheels starting back with my 2012 AMG, had the wheels on that fixed about 4 times. These new england roads are tough on the wheels but they should be stronger than they are.

mercedes wheels have always sucked, my 2007, 2011, 2014 and now my 2017 E-class have always had wheel issues. the E300 is the worst one out of all of them. Im on 18inch wheels and had two rims get bent slightly with a very slow leak. I do normal city and high way city driving and know where all the problem spots are in my city majority of the time so its not that im beating on the car.

Yep I just ordered the Mandrus wheels today. Got 500 off. 1700 for 4. Can’t take the stock wheels anymore.

I was wondering the same thing about the RFT's helping bend the rim. Stiff enough to run flat has to mean more transfer to the rim too.

i got a set of 18" Rials from Tire Rack with XIce snows on them that were great all winter. Might do similar with some Pilot 4s for summer. All in 1700 ish. The Mandrus look nice too. Definitely want to size down to 18 inch.

What's also strange is that I put the wheels back on myself, taking care to give them a nice clean and wax. The rims looked perfect, but i still felt an imbalance. I was really wondering if these RFT's had an issue in them. The Conti's have a 1 year road hazard (i.e. pothole) warranty even- I was hoping it was just a tire swap to smoothness.

So why keep buying Mercedes?

The wheels suck, not the car...

Two years in a 2017 E300. 19" wheels, RFT tires. No bent rims. Guess Florida roads are better than I thought.

Florida roads on the west coast are great! I've never encountered a pot hole or damaged a rim in the 55+ years I've lived in Clearwater.

I have a friend that keeps bending his wheels in his BMW and it's his driving. He flies over every single thing in the road and hits every single hole or ridge in the road without stopping. He never even tries to slow down or avoid anything, just bam right over it. Then complains that BMW rims are no good. I'd say it's your driving if you're bending wheels so often.

M

Nonsense.

I won't deny I'm a enthusiastic driver, but not a pothole puncher, in fact I think I'm more aware of the road than most, picking my lines carefully. But past vehicles with this same driver say the problem is these MB wheels- Two BMW's (2000 & 2006...maybe their wheels suck nowawadays too) with RFT's and a VW R with even thinner nRFT tires never had these problems & my driving hasn't changed. I'm frustrated by the problem because I don't bend wheels all the time (nor did I with my winter set on this new car). 4 bent rims in 5 weeks on the same roads I managed months on the winters without issue.

They simply made the wheels too soft and chose tires too hard.

No pot holes down here in Naples in the 4 years I’ve been here. The complete opposite of my 55 years in NY/NJ

The roads in RI are pretty bad, especially with the winter and all the rain this spring. You can't always see the potholes as they are filled with water when it's raining and night time etc? All it takes is one good pothole then the rim is never the same. That happened on my 2012 E63 AMG. I hit a big rut going all the way across the road with a paving operations down in Foxboro near where the patriots play on RT 1. There was a cop waving everyone on to go faster only to hit that rut going around 20 mph. It instantly bent all 4 rims. Then I had a lot of issues with those rims being repaired on different occasions.

Well you're clearly hitting the same holes/ruts/whatever over and over and that whatever type of driving you're doing needs to be re-examined. You aren't avoiding a known hazard it seems. 4 bent wheels in 5 weeks, where in the world are you driving? That said, if you're not going to have the same issue on winter tires because they most likely have much more sidewall than summer/RFT tires. I think the problem is limited to your driving and your area, there is nothing to suggest Mercedes wheels are too soft lol. Of course runflats are going to be hard. I have them on my BMW and I've bent or damaged 2 wheels in 7 years on Dallas roads which are terrible.


M

Same roads and same driver in 2 bmw’s and 1 vw/ no bent rims.

5 weeks in mb and 4 bent rims.

I think its how you drive on bad roads. I have 20's on my X5, living here in Austin area roads are generally good and in 18 months I've not bent or damaged any of my wheels.

When I was looking at used S-class sedans, I looked a number of Carfax reports. One thing I noticed pretty consistently was that there seemed to be a lot more alignments, tire replacements, and wheel replacements than I would normally expect to see on cars of the age and mileage I was looking at. Almost every one had had multiple tires and wheels replaced on different occasions.

My son put forth the theory that these cars ride so smoothly, drivers don't pay as much attention to dodging potholes as they otherwise would. I know driving the same road, at the same speed, in my wife's Volvo gives you a far better idea of just how crappy the road is than driving it in the Mercedes. Another possible contributor is the fact that these cars weigh a lot -- my S600 is 2-1/2 tons -- and are riding on large diameter rims with not a lot of tire sidewall, and a whole lot of positive offset. The forces involved when you fail to dodge even a moderately bad pothole are truly impressive.

Of course I live in Omaha, so if you can still see the wheels of the overturned VW Beetle in the bottom of the hole, it's a "moderate" sized pothole. A "small" pothole is only big enough to hide a couple of infantrymen.

Or course the dents come from driving. (Or I'm beginning to wonder if they just dent as it sits in my garage.) Heavy cars, rough roads, etc are all pretty darn foreseeable. They must be testing for this stuff in some way, but also clearly inadequately. Again - my experience with other cars/mfr's on the same roads was much better/ without issue.

They simply designed/spec'd the wheels/tires poorly (at least my 10 spoke).

The dealer fixed them up for no cost, so I'm happy with that service. But still disappointed with the initial quality.

"The best or nothing."