Hi all,

I am rather puzzled with what just happened with my E200 W214 which I picked up in June this year.

After attending a short meeting (an hour and a half), I came back to the car and upon switching it on a number of malfunction warnings started to pop up, mainly:

- Blind Spot and exit warning inoperative
- Acting parking assist and PARKTRONIC inoperative
- ESP inoperative
- Consult Workshop without changing transmission
- Risk of vehicle rolling away. Apply parking brake to park

The drive stalk became inoperative and I could not put the car into Drive, Park or Reverse. Even the engine would no longer switch on.

Strange thing is that I received no prior notice warnings and the car was driving without any issues until I parked and left for my meeting.

I contacted the Mercedes roadside assistance and they tried troubleshooting it remotely but nothing seems to have worked. I am now waiting for the specialist to come to me and see if he can do something about it.

What really ticks me off is this is car is 4 months old and I’m already having trouble. Can’t even imagine if it started to fail while on the highway.

Anyone else faced similar issues? Any assistance would be much appreciated.

Will keep you updated.

 

Update:

The Mercedes Roadside Assistance just left. Apparently my car was the 3rd car that had the same issues in Dubai today. They are blaming a software update (although I can’t really see if there was an update in the recent days).

They disconnected the battery in the trunk, waited two minutes, reconnected the battery and all the error messages are gone and the car is driving.

They recommended that I bring in the car in for a service and get the software re-flashed.

I do miss the old cars which were purely mechanical. These newer software centric cars are bit of a nuisance.

 

You'd think that the Mercedes engineers would segregate the core drive system from everything else... keeping that core system as small as possible, with only what is needed to drive the car, and updated very unfrequently and only after extensive testing. That way, it would most always let you keep driving... you just might not have driver assistance or entertainment or a heated cupholder or whatever, when they introduced yet another software defect in the frequently updated non-core code. This is basic embedded software engineering. I hope they are doing this.