Hi team,
I have a scenario. Our GLS lives in a fully enclosed, locked basement garage overnight. I like to leave the windows open at night and allow some airflow through the car. I have always done this with previous vehicles and it helps keep the cars fresh inside.

However, most nights (not all), between 1:00am and 3:00am the car decides it is raining and decides to close the windows. It is the middle of winter here and initially most nights it did rain in the night - so I surmised that in addition to the rain sensor (which in a shed would be struggling to see any real rain), it must be getting a weather feed to compute it was raining.

However, now after a few weeks of ownership and weather observations I notice (bear in mind this is when the GLS in in the shed, so no real rain is involved):
- the auto close of windows always happens In the early morning hours - doesn’t matter if it is raining or not
- if it rains during daylight hours (remember car is in a shed), the window close does not activate (so kinda rules out a weather feed)
- it doesn’t happen every night - probably 65% of nights


What could be happening do you think?

A few ideas:
- temperature. We are in winter, with overnight lows outside around the 6-8 Celsius mark. Garage is not heated so does get down to around 12 deg Celsius overnight. I wonder if temperature might be a trigger
- IR Sensor, there is an alarm sensor above the front of the GLS. PIR is not armed overnight, but would still be sensing movement. Could be interfering. Although this doesn’t explain the time trigger.
- LEDs, there are some LED lights our water heater controller, which is directly in front of the GLS on the wall. Those LEDs run all night - another possible interference source - but again they are not time related.
- Mercedes Me issue - could something server side be happening to trigger the close, unrelated to my garage ?
- Window - there is a large glass window right in front of the GLS. I wonder if something outside could trigger the rain sensor ?
- faulty rain sensor on the car - but odd that the problem seems to be time related - although potentially voltage could drown when the vehicle gets cold as well. So could be sensor/voltage related.

Anyone else had their windows close for no genuine rain reason ? Any head start ideas before I do more testing ?

 

Well, may have made some progress here (with no help from Mercedes Me support or the dealer).

The manual mentions that windows will be auto closed 6 hours after turning off the engine (if left open). Checked it and this looks really promising - the window shut time does seem to correspond to 6 hours after we get home each day. This explains why the weather is actually irrelevant (especially in the shed) and it doesn’t happen each day (e.g. if I open the windows without starting the engine, seems the rule does not apply).

So whilst Mercedes Me reports this event as a “rain close” event - looks like it might actually be this “time based close” event. So just a bad software alert from Mercedes Me hopefully.

if this only triggers if the windows are open at engine shutdown, then maybe all I have to do is change my parking order - I.e turn the engine off and then open the windows in the shed. More testing to be done.

e.g my wife got home approx 9:20 last night, and then at 3:20 in the morning the closure occurred.

 

So there are 4 reasons why the windows would auto close…

1. Actual rain
2. 6 Hours after engine shutdown (seems only if the windows were open at the time the engine was turned off)
3. Low temperature (no information on what temperature would trigger this)
4. Battery issue (presumably low voltage alert, so the can can be secured while there is still sufficient power)

1,3 & 4 I can see good logic in these.
But 2 - 6 hours after engine - struggling with the logic here. Perhaps German thieves wait for a vehicle to be parked for 6 hours before they attempt to steal it ???

 

wow. I did not know that X167 does this.
good info here.