Aloha, I have an SL500 ('91) in which the drivers seat does not move. I was told by the shop that the seat controller is broken and it is under the seat. Sooo, I cannot move the seat to get to the controller to get the seat to move Can I power a wire on door controller (which is loose on door panel and I can get to back of it) to get it to move? Is the controller under the seat as was told to me?

I have read everything here about engine sputtering. I have gathered it could be in the MAF and will use some CRC to clean that. Car has sat for awhile and may have some bad fuel too. Any other ideas I may try? It sputters when I give it gas but runs ok if steady on gas. Thanks in advance for any ideas. I am new to Mercedes and it is foreign to me as opposed to BMW where I can tear in to those easily.

 

ha 79 views and not one opinion about either of these problems.

I solved the first one. There are two large phillips screw under corners of front seat pad that hold the whole seat in place. Take those out and you can lift it up and slide it forward to reveal all motors, controller. Since my seat was all the way forward, put power to blue wire on motor and it will move seat backwards. You need to power up small rod to poke in down at connector. Do not power purple wire It seems to be the ground.

I am on many other car forums that are very helpful and frankly had low expectations that may MB owners would be ones to tear into their cars but I expected at least one post Being that these cars are so expensive I would think the sharing of info would be more prevalent. I guess not. This car is immaculate but is a POS with so many little things wrong it is absurd. I cannot imagine a car depreciating as much as these and having such a large potential repair liability (other than older jaguars). This is the one German car company I never got into and am very glad for it after this '91 sl500 experience. Thanks anyway.

 

First, that's a nice attitude you got there.

I think if anyone felt even the slightest bit guilty for not stepping up to help you quicker, you've just made them feel a whole lot better about not lending you a hand.

Secondly, not to be rude, but if your car was really "immaculate" then the seat would be working and so would everything else. In this case, the chicken doesn't come before the egg...

If you bought a piece of junk (which it sounds like you did) that looks nice but has multiple electrical problems, it's going to be expensive and time-consuming to fix. That goes for everything from a Mercedes to a Ford, by the way...it's hardly limited to this brand.

Whoever said "There is nothing so expensive as a cheap car..." had it completely right. In my book, you can't take a car that has multiple issues, on which you can't even move the driver's seat, and then call it "immaculate". Nor can you expect to fix everything wrong with it for $200. That's why you don't buy cars with things like that going on. It's expensive. But that isn't Mercedes' responsibility, it's yours. Don't buy junk. Not even nice-looking junk.

As to why people on this board don't have the knowledge some other car boards have, it's because an SL500/600 isn't an '83 CRX...a good chunk of the people driving these cars bought them new for $100k, and a significant portion of the rest paid somewhere around the cost of a fully-loaded new Honda, Kia, Toyota, etc. just to pick up a 5-10yr old used SL.

As a function of demographics, that situation isn't going to attract the 17yr old kids who will spend 2 days tearing the car apart themselves to rebuild a seat motor, and then spend another 3 days on the internet discussing it. 99% of SL owners probably never touch their cars themselves.

Even out of the ones that do, the bottom line is that it's a 4000lb+ car with around 300hp. While sufficient, it isn't going to win any drag races, and there's not a whole lot you can do to it other than sending it off to RennTech or Brabus for $40k. So, you're not attracting the souper-upper crowd either.

It sounds like what you want is something that you can work on yourself with contact-cleaner and duct tape. That's not our fault. Go buy a CRX and rice it up.

 

Please...

The car is immaculate- a word that pertains to appearance not functionality. I see my tone may have been mis-interpreted. I was not upset but perhaps disappointed. I think it is common sense that the average MB owner is not going to work on their cars but something as simple as the two screws, in plain sight once you put head in footwell looking at seat, that hold the lower seat portion on the car is something all should know about as it is how you get to motors, find lost items, increase your wealth with spare change etc.

My point is that MB owners should share their knowledge more so than CRX owners as the costs are so much higher and service is so much more limited. As I mentioned, other high end car boards I am on are very supportive and useful.

Your premise is that a junk car has more of chance of having problems but in my decades of dealing with cars, they all have an equally opportunity to break down- no matter what the price someone paid, albeit a well maintained car will be miles ahead in reliability (as this car was its whole life). For the record, I did not by mine but am in charge of it for a friend. I am not here to debate and will not come back to refute anything you say but I simply wanted to highlight the potential value of these boards (while adding how I fixed it which is nowhere else on your boards) and spur discussion among yourselves (hopefully drawing in newbies than heckling them), for the benefit of all of you. Good day

 

Alright, fair enough.

My advice would be that, if the only function that doesn't work on the seat is the back-and-forth movement, then it's probably the motor. If this is the case, there is a nice cheap set of them on Ebay right now, do a search for "SL500 seat motor". If you feel you can install this yourself, then do it. Electrically, it's easy, they have plug connectors. Attaching the wires that actually move the seat is a tiny bit trickier, but nothing too bad.

I helped my mechanic buddy change one of these out on the 1982 300SD I had, and it doesn't look like the basic design has changed much. If you can already manipulate the seat and get to the motor, then you should have little trouble. The seatback motors, you will have to take the rear seat cover off to get to, but if those aren't working either then you should probably just forget about the motors as being the possible cause of the problem, since there's like a 1% chance that all of them could just fail simultaneously.

If the entire seat doesn't work, then odds are that it's the control panel unit that's attached to the door, and not the motors. This craps out due to all the banging around when the doors are closed, and especially if someone leaves the top down and it happens to rain....which incidentally is also the main cause of interior electronic failure in convertibles generally.

You can also buy the door-mounted control panels on the 'bay, and they are much easier to install than the motor itself. You just pull the panel off, and plug the new panel in. Just make sure you get the plastic clips from the dealer that attach it to the door, as those don't hold up very well and will probably break when you try to remove and reinstall the panel. Actually, they'll break anyway if you slam the doors a lot, so may as well replace them while you're messing with it.

That would be my $0.02.