The last good looking modern S class.

I think...
2005 to 2009 fail black (NTG3.0)
2010 to 2013 fail blue (NTG3.5)

So my S600’s camera started flickering intermittently over the last couple weeks (a couple time going totally black) so I followed the instructions in this post before losing power completely… and low and behold exact same spot on the left trunk arm.

What I noticed though is that the break occurred on the outer wiring and there’s a second layer of wiring seemingly protected by a clear epoxy or rubber.

My initial thought was to just make a clean cut at the break point and make a new connection for both the damaged outer layer and the inner layer.

I thought I had some wire in my garage but didn’t so I just left the perfectly intact inner layer and simply exposed about an inch of fresh wire on each side of the break and twisted both ends together and wrapped with black electric tape!

Good as new!

The stealership quoted me almost $2,000 to fix. Just to make a point, I wanted this to be a completely $0 fix so instead of buying wire I stripped an old iPhone charger and used about 5 inches of wire and voila.

What did the damage on the outer wire look like?
My camera switches between flickering black and white and completely black.
I found small damage on the cable, but not sure if it is broken or not.
Does it look broken to anyone? Should I try to cut the cable and rewire it?


Front of cable

Front of cable 2

Damage behind the cable.

wire breaks are stress fractures from work hardening with repeated use - they deliberately route cables so all the stress occurs on the same point with routing that exacerbates the strain at once specific point till inside under the insulation they snap

the outer sheath kinks in your pics is likely nothing to do with it...

Okay, got it!

The previous owner told me that the camera broke when he damaged the shark fin antenna, but I can still use an FM Bluetooth transmitter without any problems.
Therefore, I think that there might be something with the cable.
Do you know of any other places where it might be broken?

shark fin is part of the nav, radio and phone antenna

it should have zero relationship to the rear camera... the camera cable breaks wires where the stress of the boot opening and closing stresses the wires - this is normal on all mercs (they designed them to break)
the camera on the early ones (is aluminium) and can be taken apart (kind of) by unscrewing the 4 bolts holding the two halves together - its gets damp inside and the aluminium goes all white and furry inside and the unit plays up, careful cleaning drying out and delicate application of ACF-50 on circuit boards can get them back to life

Opened the camera module and cleaned it with 99%. isopropyl alcohol. Is this kind of static a sign of a dying camera or a broken cable? (Think I replied with the same message in another forum post. Sorry about that!)

For anyone that comes across this issue, it’s 100% accurate lol. I checked the wire coming all the way from the camera end to nearly under the trunk liner just after the L arm. At first I didn’t see any breaks but then I removed the bottom liner where it goes inside the roof of the trunk and THERE IT WAS. The break was clean. The whole black cable was snapped apart. Time to fix!

I attached a video of it. Hope this helps someone one day