`


IGOR -

3 DAYS without your COUPE

Don't want you to start Jonesing -






As the Xpel process begins The COUPE

looks incredible under the lights -

EAS / Mr. Tint & Sun have not had a Mercedes

with your color interior in quite some time -

Big change from the black interior -

Friday alone your COUPE received 100%

positive comments from all the employees

and from customers stopping by with their cars -

Picture by Ben at EAS -

P.M. SENT -


Thank-You
D.B.


.

 

Thanks D.B., great to see it sooo clean and shiny

 

@COOPERDB - do you by chance have details on air filter? I've reached out to @shradul and he is asking for the picture of the engine bay (that I can';t really get with the car sitting at EAS ).

 

`


Igor -

Check your P.M.'s -

If you get them ordered today they may be here

by the time you pick-up your COUPE and

Ben can install them for you -


Thank-You
D.B.


.

 

What a beautiful car. Enjoy in good health.

 

Beautiful man Enjoy it in good health and happiness

 

Had my car back for two days after wonderful guys at EAS did their magic with ppf and coating. I had dealer installed ppf on the last car and the quality (short term observation ) is night and day.

Love it so far with tons of the complements. Still eagerly awaiting for the 1K miles to pass before I can push the car hard. Infotainment software and controls are not bad, really like how well voice recognition works and that it spans all aspects from the music selection to the free form address search. I would have still selected BMW idrive version as the top if it was not for the touch buttons on the steering wheel that make huge difference. Burmester 3d is a worthy upgrade with multi-channel flac music, surprised that there is no frequency equalizer.

I was a bit bummed by the dash configuration options and limitations of what can go where. What made me even more surprised (unpleasantly) is the tie in of the auto high beam to a single auto lighting switch. This simply makes to sense as I want to leave my lights "auto" at all times and I still want to be able to choose high beams manually.

Couple of other observations on the "extensions" to the car
1. Radenso GPS start up time is sloooow, takes about 3-5 minutes before it gets the signal. I will poke radenso folks to understand the reason as it should not be that slow.
2. Blackvue does a great job recording, but app and connectivity leave a lot to be desired
3. I was surprised to see the Blackvue largest battery go flat in 12 hours, I'll check if turning off wifi and selecting parking mode would help

 

Agree on the dash configurations. At the very least the supersport from the GT63S would be nice.

 

Igor,

1. My Escort GPS turns on in less than 6 seconds. The entire system is up and running before I exit the garage. It sounds like something is wrong and needs troubleshooting or a firmware upgrade.

2. True. The functionality is sound but the UX sucks. I used it once when Dorian has a Kia side-swipe us and it works when needed. Despite the crap UX of switching network configs...

3. So, I found that I do have the battery and bottom-line, I haven't had problems with it since I got it, so whatever it does it still has a power drain protection system that shields the coupe from losing power. My wi-fi is on in both driving and parking modes (in case an alarm needs to be sent to me, which happened once when someone at work just fondly lingered around to inspect Dorian.

4. INSURANCE: You didn't ask butTal (my wife) wanted to pass advice we learned since owning Dorian. You need high end insurance in case anything bad ever happens. For regular insurance companies (e.g. State Farm), the C217 is no different than your average Toyota. Ask and they will tell you. They will treat you and you C217 just like a Ford pick-up or mid range Nissan. They have no clue what a high end car is about. We switched to Chubb Insurance a couple of years ago. It is more expensive but you get what you pay for. When the Kia side swiped us, I had a BMW 7 series ready as a loaner from Chubb the next day, and all repairs were approved in my shop of choice in less than 48 hours. I can't recommend Chubb highly enough for the magnificent and rare coupe! Let me know if you want my agent contact information.

Hope this help and thanks for sharing the good word on the great folks at Eastside (Ben, Joey, Rudy, and folks). It's just one of the doors DB opened for me, helping me get to know the best people in the business, and one of (the original) reasons I value him so much.

I had a blast taking a solo weekend day trip to somewhere passed Spokane (~630 miles round trip) just for the joy of driving Dorian as intended. Left at dawn, passed the mountain range with the sunrise, enjoyed the far better empty roads of Eastern WA, got there to have breakfast, and came home for lunch with Tal :-)

Enjoy your Coupe in good health and with very good driving. Take the AMG class too! The harder you push your coupe (post break-in), the more you will appreciate and love it. There's nothing like it!

 

Thanks Dan!

#1 - I had the same experience with portable escorts in the past with near instant GPS signal acquisition. I'll be reaching out to Radenso to troubleshoot. Said that, it only impacts GPS (though highly unfortunate as I'm usually going through couple of stationary signals before GPS operation) with the rest of the functionality available right on the start up. I have not observed a huge difference in junk signal filtering though subjectively I'd rate it better compared to escort.

#2 - I'm about to ping Blackvue with the suggestion that I'd code for them the feature of turning system off based on the known network myself

#3 - Car is protected, it is the Blackvue battery that fully discharges in about 10 hours (need to look at time stamps to better gauge). Hard to believe that it is so power hungry in the parking mode.

Thanks for the poke on the insurance, this is something on the list of things to do all up as gives a great opportunity to rebuild overall start (and yes, right now we are with the State Farm all up).

WRT EAS - I was really happy to see so much positive feedback to the job they do from multiple sources.

D.B. passed along the note on no more 2020 orders, that sucks. You might want to ping Gregg at Bellevue dealership to see if he find a slot.

 

I had an Escort 360Max and it pretty much could not acquire GPS from within the S63. Sent it back thinking it was defective, and the replacement unit was just as bad.

I switched to Uniden (currently using R3 in S63 and R7 in 720S, R7 has the directional arrows)... they connect to GPS instantly and are incredibly sensitive. R7 supposed to get auto GPS lockouts but not implemented yet, not holding my breath. Unfortunately there is no good place to mount these portable units, the two windshield areas free of shielding are too high (right of RVM, designed for toll transponders) or too low (center bottom designed for vehicle GPS) for any decent mount option. There is no Blendmount available for Mercedes because of the mirror stalk design, and there is shielding under the RVM anyway

If there were widespread LIDAR in use here, I'd probably get the ALP system with NetRadar DSP.

 

ALP is already part of the install, Radenso integrates it as part of the package giving the single control plane.

 

#1, Let me know how it works over time. I'm very happy with my MAX Ci 360 system which auto-blocks noise based on GPS and self-learning.
#2, PitaSoft is based in Singapore and might very well take your offer :-)
#3, Good + That is very strange. They need a performance analysis team...
#4, Switch away ASAP - It ought to be your #1 priority now

We went far beyond any US dealer, and our Lynnwood dealer is one of the best MB dealers in the US...Mercedes Circle of Excellence, MBUSA, Daimler Board of Management, then they worked with MBUSA and my dealer.... you imagine it and we've done it. It's a done deal - no more build to spec 2020 coupes. Some dealers wasted slots which are now being built and they are so poorly configured -- CHEAP comes to mind -that those dealer configured builds are not worth buying as they make a C class look good. That's damn sad and truly stupid way to do business. Not my problem any more and the C217 2020 is now officially killed. One more reason to get Chubb ASAP!

Anyway, life goes on. It is just the 2 of us and we have 2 AMGs. Tal puts very little milage on whatever she drives like a demon :-) which means we have time to search and find an awesome 3rd coupe.

With DB on our side we can't fail to find something GREAT! No worries! Just enjoy your Coupe!!

 

I was very keen on this one (BRABUS DE) but there are none to be had in the USA. BRABUS USA is very limited in what they can upgrade, and are unable to do the below:

BRABUS M800 (DE Version) - None in the USA

 

As an aside Igor, did you figure out the slow GPS start?

It’ll be great to get your feedback after you finish the break-in and start to seriously test the coupe’s capabilities.

Enjoy,
Dan

 

It will probably require test fitting of the antenna at an alternative location (behind the grill right now). Radenso folks are working SU on figuring out the best placement and I will have to drop it off for testing either end of this or next week. There is a good thread on rdforum.org. I'm also scheduling with Vortex to get shifter testing once we can get a rain free day, could be a good idea to join the forces if you are interested.

On the dash cam - I'm at 17+ hours of run time that makes me happier. Still need to figure out how to stop power usage at known locations and Blackvue is not yet taking my offer of coding if for them

Another 500 miles until break in ends...

 

Update on Radenso RC-M.

Short version - problems are solved (at least based on the 24 hours of observation)

Long version - Charles and Systems Unlimited spent full day yesterday troubleshooting with close engagement from Radenso. I was very impressed with Radenso's engagement both from rdforum and yesterday's debugging and even happier with Systems Unlimited. They ended up testing a different computer module to give false hope on a simple replacement that was proven to be incorrect shortly. The guess on the original placement is that the metallic paint of the front fascia interferes with the reliable signal acquisition. It took number of attempts to properly place antenna, windshield coating plays a big role. Eventually it was hidden under the dash next to one of the two windows in the windshield that does not have coating. Now it picks up the signal within 2 minutes after leaving the garage that is within the ballpark of my old Escort observations (that might have still been a bit faster to lock gps signal).

General notes

I'm still below 1K but started pushing it a bit more. So far this is the best daily driver I had driven and I enjoy the car a lot. Love the torque even though I still have not pushed it far enough and the sound of the exhaust on the the startup with one of the paddles pulled is awesome. I wish steering was a bit more connected and a bit heavier (yes, I'm talking about s+) but by design it will never be the same as my long gone e46 M3 (that was the last "ultimate driving machine" before BMW completely ruined itself).

CCB produces zero dust. Still need to bed them as weather was crazy in Seattle area to execute on the crazy bedding procedure D.B. Cooper had referenced

New neat peak - I have a lot of multi channel albums on the usb and for some reason MB's natural song order is alphabetical instead of the track#.

Ceramic coating clearly helps with less dirt accumulating.

 

That’s great, Igor. Nothing like good news to end the day. Hopefully this nasty weather will go away soon. Have fun!

 

@Dan B - did you figure out what's the next ride will be?

 

Yes, it will be in Eastside for all the needed work around mid-March. It depend on when the custom work is complete. I'll share Pics when the coupe is ready :-)