Hello.

Our 2006 R350.....has a sticker under the hood, stating that the vehicle has an all wheel drive system...blah...blah..., yet there is no 4matic badge on the back. Every R350 I have seen has the 4matic on the gate, on the passenger side rear...

My question...what does 4matic actually stand for....I guess then I will know if I should have the badging or not....

Thanks!

 

AFAIK, all R-class sold in the U.S. came with the 4matic, which is the MB full-time AWD system.

Not sure about the ROW R-class offerings.

 

You can go to your dealer and have them put on a badge.

2WD R-class have been produced, but not in 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4Matic

 

06 07 and 08 are all 4matic, 4WD. In 09, to bring the price point down due to poor sales, R350s could be optioned as rear wheel drive only - without 4Matic. These cars do not have the 4Matic badge. I would guess your 06 may have had the badge removed for whatever reason - perhaps paint work?

 

I have a 2006 R500 with 4MATIC but also no badge. A couple of years ago I asked my service advisor this very question and he didn't know the answer! In fact he showed me another 2006 R500 that was for sale on his lot that had the badge. The next day the service advisor send me an email with the answer MBUSA gave him. It turns out, in the beginning none had a badge. They decided in mid-production model year 2006 to advertise the fact that the vehicle comes with 4MATIC as they felt that they were hiding such an important feature, so they put a badge on the back of all R350 and R500s. This resulted in half the cars having the badge and the rest not having it. Later on they offered a 2WD version in limited numbers particularly in the southern states where the demand would be higher, and obviously those don't have the 4MATIC badge on.

The bottom line is that you have an all-wheel-drive vehicle.

 

our r500 didn't have the 4matic badge either....I emailed Mercedes and they sent me one (easy to put on yourself)....just to show you that they care about customer loyalty, they also threw in a money clip along with a nice letter explaining that not all cars in 2006 got the badge that needed it.

 

Thanks for the info!

I will definately put the badge on...ours is an early '06.....now the wife won't ask me why they all say it 'cept hers....lol....hey if momma is happy.....

 

When I bought my 08 R320, I had all those letters removed from the whole car.

I didn't want to wax around them all the time.

My salesman stated that alot of people will "de-badge" their car.

Maybe you got one of those?

 

It is highly unlikely approx 50% of the 2006 R350s and R500 were de-badged by their owners.

 

Some are ordered that way on options. You can option that there are no hardmarks on the vehicle. I do remember some coming through back in 05/06 that only had the hardmark on the left. The new R300 is available in 2wd (but its not available in the US) so it only has the R300 hardmark. What ever the broadcast sheet calls for on the vehicle is what hardmarks it gets, what ever is on the broadcast sheet is what was ordered.