Yes, we actually inherited the car when my wife's father died last year, so unfortunately he is not here to press the case. Believe me, if he were still here, we wouldn't have the car! He loved it and this is part of the reason that we want to keep the car - my wife had just bought a Jeep Liberty and I am a pick-up guy for work reasons. I nicely explained this to the service manager, and was basically blown-off.

Most infuriating was that he really hadn't heard of these problems in early C-classes. I think this was a lot of BS. Since he was not aware of the problem, I've written a follow-up letter to him with about 20 pages of info from this site and others in regard to the problem. I also copied the general manager, so we'll see what happens.