Received response from NHTSA to my inquiry on results of their investigation on the ML balancer failures, being one of the complainers to the NHTSA. Results of the investigation are available on their web site if you enter PE03058 in the search box. INCR-PE03058-17713P.pdf is the closing report. In summary, 55 complaints were registered by NHTSA, another 503 complaints were received by Mercedes. Apparently Mercedes also paid out 59,211 warranty claims on ML's for this defect. Also, 421,204 model year 1998-2000 Mercedes vehicles have this design balancer, with 255,930 with a balancer potentially subject to the same failure mode. As of April, Mercedes reported 5 related lawsuits. These are stats from the NHTSA final report. No consolation for those of us that shelled out $1500-3000 for collateral damage. But at least it's costing Benz. We can only hope for class action.

Further info from the report. Mercedes did not issue a TSB, but did issue "tech Tips" in 2000 to select factory technicians. This should have been a TSB to alert all. Mercedes also reported that the failure is progressive, with plenty of warning. Based on one personal experience, I do not concur.

I encourage all to read the report.