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.

 

Exactly same thing happened to me last night, what happened subsequently?

 

ME TOO!!!

I agree......

 

what you described just happened to my E450 W214 two days ago. it's been at the service center for two days now. what was the resolution on your vehicle?

 

If the car is otherwise driving perfectly, I would just turn off the Automatic updates, so that we’d not be caught at a bad time with unnecessary updates. I assume there’s an option to turn OFF the automatic updates.

 

This happened to me, the solution was a buyback from MBUSA. They could not fix it.

 

Would had thought it was simply a bad battery, did they at least identified the cause just not the fix?
Or the car simply meet the lemon law criteria and they didn't bother?

 

Yes. Try access protection.

 

For me, the issue was diagnosed as a software glitch and was fixed (through a manual update to the MBUX Control Module) and I haven't experienced the same issue again. With that said, I have encountered other problems which I have reported here on the forum (engine light, MBUX system reset while driving etc) that too were explained to me as software related anomalies.

The underlying issue it seems, is that the software on these cars (particularly the early builds), is not entirely stable - from what I was told by service guys is that Mercedes is trying to address this by pushing out frequent software updates (some of which require visits to the service center) which have made MBUX more stable (relatively speaking). Mechanically, the car works perfect.

 

Yes it is not just the W214 experiencing these software issues, they are slowly fixing them give them a few years to work it out. Agree, nothing mechanical just software but it does get annoying.

 

I had the same problem twice, once while parked and again in rush hour traffic. The final solution was 23 software updates which took 6 days to complete. I posted my experience as "Anyone having engine stall problems".

 

Thanks for confirming.

 

The only good way to really solve it, is by re-loading MBUX at the dealership, from scratch, to the latest version. Not by uploading periodic patches.

In my 2024 GLE450, I used to have intermittent drops of my Apple Carplay (wired and wireless), which was completely solved, when they reloaded MBUX at the dealership.

A typical MBUX update takes around 15 minutes at the dealership, but this re-loading of MBUX took over 3 hours, which is an absolutely massive job. But what that also did, is that all of the glitches with Apple Carplay, totally disappeared, and the car ran like a dream thereafter.

 

Wow. Guess I'll stop complaining about the Favorites issue with my radio....

 

You have the Right to complain though.

 

I think what he's saying is when he sees "logs" in his brother's eye, he feels reluctant complaining about the "speck of dust" in his own eyes !

 

I had the same issue a month ago, as I reported on another post. The warnings were flying across the screen faster than I could take pictures of all of them. Luckily, I was about 3 miles from my dealer. My SA told me to drive over, despite the warning to not shift the transmission. The "faults" were sort of wrong because the car shifted, it was in Park when the warnings said it wasn't and the Parking Brake was on when the warnings said it wasn't. It took them 15 software updates (see service order below) - I thought the SA was exaggerating when he said that, but the service order confirms. They gave me a loaner and the car was ready after a couple of days testing to confirm the software updates worked.

Bottom line, the car has worked perfectly since then (knock on black ash wood).

 

I see.

 

Thanks for posting the work order.

 

Keep in mind that MBUX is not the only software in the car. In fact, I doubt it's even the main reason some people have these types of issues. Its more the user interface hence the name MB User Experience.

There are software systems all over the place with each one responsible for different functions. All of them reporting back to some master controller. People with multiple updates likely had to have many different updates rather then one big one over and over. It's a complex marriage of software, sensors, switches, and machine that all must work seamlessly together. The fact that everyone is not having these issues suggest not an issue with the software design or build quality, but rather corrupt code or data. Just as computer software can become corrupt and require a reinstall of the OS or apps. Occasionally, faulty hardware can cause software to become corrupt or just not respond properly.

There can and will be bugs in every software application. Its inevitable. This is why, we tend to write shorter and single purpose software functions that reduces complexity and makes it easier to troubleshoot. This partially moves the problematic area to interfaces where two software functions expect a contract to be followed when communicating. When an interface contract is broken the typical response is an exception is thrown. Although internal issues in the function can also cause an exception. Not all functions handle exceptions and will often throw the exception further up the call stack. A function called "A" may call "B" which then calls "C". It can get very deep in complex systems. If some downstream function gets invalid data and doesn't know what to do, it likely throws an exception. That exception moves back up the stack until something can handle it in some meaningful way. Often that is to throw an error message to a user interface device and just stop the call process. This is when we may see some failure message on the display that doesn't align with reality such as the car may roll away when it's in park with the parking brake on. In some cases, these issues may cause mechanical functions to fail such as not going into gear.

I'm not saying I know how the car works, but I do know how software is designed and built. I assume the software in cars use the same basic principles as any other complex software system. Just with many moving parts and sensors as inputs and outputs. I'm sure there are a ton of regulations and other non functional requirements that go into the design, but at the core they all follow the same underlying patterns.