Haven't gotten my car back from the shop but here is the breakdown.

After not passing at a Test Only Station, they alerted me to the Consumer Assistance Program (CAP), funded by all of us California taxpayers. You can get $500 of repair assistance from being Income Eligible or Test-Only Eligible. I qualified under the Test-Only criteria. You send off an application to Sacramento and they spot you $500 for smog repairs IF there is $$$ still in the fund. Lucky for me then that my test was early in the year. You get a long list of approved repair stations that you must select from. I made quite a few calls and they were not encouraging. A lot of the shops were corner gas stations. I got lucky and called a Honda/Acura only shop who then referred me to a nearby shop that sounded good. The shop was neat, filled with cars, AAA approved, ASE everything, and one thing I always like to see, big SnapOn tool chests.

I talked with their smog fellow and he seemed to be familiar with MBZs. Here is what he discovered:

Testing the EGR valve with vacuum showed it leaking/failing. The results of a second smog check showed much worse NO numbers than the original test. No change to the idle so the tube was clogged also. The solenoid switch that activates the valve was also faulty. Total repair about $820. There is a $100 co-pay, so I pay a total of $320. They were able to get parts at reasonable prices, $275 for the valve and $67 for the solenoid and they will just clean the tube.

I initially thought that this program could turn out to be a big boondoggle for all these repair shops to inflate repair costs to "use" up the initial $500 and then keep charging but the guy said that before going ahead they must lay out the repair plan for Sacramento approval, so there is some oversight.

When I mentioned I had recently just replaced the O2 sensor he said that might be a problem particularly if I used generic and just crimped the connections. My repair was OK but he said they have seen problems with generics unless the connections were soldered. He said that these sensors operate at such low voltages that OEM connectors without splices were best followed by a good soldered connection.


glenmore
1991 300CE
2000 C280
1990 LS400