Rick Di Vita

Anyone else experience a complete failed engine with a random hydro-locked failure and subsequent bent rod from a failed injector stuck open. I had this happen to me a month ago with 66,000 miles on my 2008 S63. I was at highway speed with no error messages to suggest a problem was occurring. I bought this car used and did not have an extended warranty. I was shocked that Mercedes was only willing to give me a 10% discount on a $50000 repair bill. The car is only worth about $35K, so that is hard to make sense of. Mercedes do not stand behind this expensive engine much.

PeterUbers

So what are you going to do now?

Was the car serviced? Why no extended warranty?

Rick Di Vita

Replacing engine with another engine out of a crashed car with less miles on it. Check the fuel injectors and replace them frequently. This is my daily driver, not my nice car, so I will see how it goes, but I will never buy another AMG. And I want to share my experience, like I did yesterday, so you guys have that insight. The car was maintained very well by Mercedes until 2013 and then by a third party. Mercedes Benz said it was not a maintenance issue, just a fluke. I took the chance and skipped the extended warranty and lost that bet. I have seen over and over again on this forum that MB helped much more with hydro lock issues than they are willing to do for me because I did not buy it new.

Shadow5501

I've seen people post about it before. If you google up something along the lines of "m156 injector" you'll find a few stories. Most engines survived, few did not. Are you aware of the various other issues with the m156, head bolts in particular?

Rick Di Vita

Yes, I know about the head bolts. Once the engine failed I have been learning a lot about it. Been talking to all the major shops (rennetech and others) as well as a mechanic that rebuilds the engines for MB and the insurance companies to have lower cost alternatives than a $50k new engine. He claims he has been to the AMG factory and trained some of the guys over there about repairing the engine. He can rebuild them and offer a 4 year warranty, but it costs over $20K for him to do it. He says the engine is pushed to its limits and to do maintenance like oil change every 3000 miles. Replace the headbolts with the updated design or the aftermarket improvements and replace the injectors every 50000 miles or less. He has worked on hundreds of these engines. Of course he sees all the failures day in and day out, so he bases his view (he is an engineer, as I am as well) on that and probably has learned to be overkill with maintenance recommendations. Also, many of the cars have hydro locked from ingesting water and are insurance claims, so those are not a fault of the design or a weakness of the engine. I'm not sure why there isn't a failsafe design to foresee the open injector issue and shut it down. I think this happens on other cars as well. Mine happened at highway speed in all of about 2 seconds, as you can imagine, no chance to save it. For the two years I owned this car its was never pushed. Like I said it was not my fast car, a daily driver, but who knows what the previous owners did with it. It had a good maintenance record at MB, but you never know.