Oxygen

I finally got rid of my awful wood/leather steering wheel today and installed an OEM AMG wheel which is incomparable to the wheel that I had my paws on all this time.

Anyhow, my stock steering wheel did not have the buttons on the back for shifting...

The AMG steering wheel does, and the wheel had a small wire inside of it with this connector:



After I removed my original steering wheel, I noticed that the plastic doohikie on the steering column had a port that accepts the connection from the AMG steering wheel:



Nothing was plugged in there originally because the stock steering wheel did not have shift buttons.

I plugged the connector from the AMG wheel in the port but the car has no reaction to the buttons... I tried pressing them in D and when already in M mode but nothing changes when you press the buttons.

Does this functionality need to be enabled via STAR or is there more to it than that?

jangy

I'd follow that thing. You may be onto something. I can take my wheel off and tell you if that is where my plug goes. Time to have an S link up top STAR and see whatup... Odd nobody would have tried this before.

Oxygen

Thanks Jangy, only the airbag needs to be removed.

If indeed I am able to "activate" this functionality on my car, I would love to pick up a set of VRP Paddle Shifters...



http://vrptuning.com/cart/index.php?...products_id=14

Those are SICK!

jangy

taking the airbag out is easy. You have any STAR enabled friends there? MHS / Heyvon have a sweet setup going. That would be a 2 second check for them.

Oxygen

Not many, never met any, only heard about them...

I was I was on the West Coast...

bobgodd

Do you have any pics of the steering wheel from a little further back? I wish I could give you a straight up answer instantly because I just had my steering wheel apart (to swap in E63 shift paddles) a few weeks ago, but I don't remember that connector being for the shift buttons.

Check this thread out, it might be of some help. When you take out the airbag support bracket, there are two pairs of wires running from the steering column, to where the shift buttons would be, one pair on the left (down shift) and one on the right (up shift), and I believe the colors were red and blue for one pair and red and black for the other pair.

In this pic, the wires are connected in the "top" spot of the connectors just to the right of the steering wheel mounting bolt, hope this helps some lol.

Oxygen

bobgodd, thanks for the input.

Looks like the same idea as my wheel except my plug was on the bottom, and yours is on top.