Jim,

All manufacturer's reps. pull this, "Its news to me", crap. I have had 2 Dodge mini vans and a total of 6 transmissions between the two. Weak trans. in Chrysler vans is very common knowledge among users and I am sure among the dealers yet I had a local shop manager look me right in the eye and tell me that he had never heard of this problem in the 15 years that he had run that shop. I nearly laughed in his face. Fortunately my son ran the car (190K miles) through deep water on the road and bent a rod in the engine so the car is now for sale for parts.

I used to work for an off shore oil field supply boat company and we used a lot of 1,100 hp V16 399 Catapillar marine engines. These engines had a history of bad cam shafts. All the chief engineers in all the supply boat companies knew about the problem. In fact when you got a bunch of engineers together at something like the workboat show in New Orleans each year that was the first thing they talked about.

We all went to a seminar offered by Cat to introduce a new engine. The first question was whether the new engine would suffer from the same cam problem as did the current V-16. The Cat rep. looked at the questioner and said that that was the first hea had ever heard of that engine having a cam problem. The combined moan of the group could be heard in Texas I am sure.

I think that the thing that pisses me off the most is that these reps. treat you like you are some rube that just fell off a cabage truck. If one is a mechanic he is aware of these problems becasue he has to fix them. If one is a maintenance superintendent then you know about them because you have to go to your boss and ask for money to fix them. And if you are an owner your know about them because you have to pay for the repairs. One way or the other you are not making up the stories out of whole cloth inspite of what the rep. thinks.

If your mechanic doesn't know about the 350 bent rods then he is either lying to you or is so incompetent that he shouldn't be repersenting a dealership. See if you can find a recall notice and take it to him. Better yet take it to the dealership owner and tell his that his shop super. is unaware of a rather major malfunction in a MB car.