Dan,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I apologize if you think I’m putting you in the position of being the MB representative. I know you aren’t. And I’m not looking for a fight.

Regarding QC, I doubt MB would need to spend an hour per transmission to perfect the product, and while I’m not saying it’s a bad machine (I like mine and take it everywhere my ML goes!) were MB to spend, and this is a guess, say 1,000 hours or even 10,000 hours on working out the details related to early failures and resolving QC issues leading to this, they would be at the point where maybe 1 in 1,000,000 transmissions failed in the first 200,000 miles, the result of this would be almost 0 service requirements for the transmission. Only folks "hurt" by this would be MB parts and folks who repair transmissions. And remember that MB has been making cars for over 100 years, so they’ve had ample opportunity to work stuff out. Building to a price has no bearing on a car that sells at or above $40,000. So, in the end you simply have to conclude they typically wear out far earlier than this because MB makes lots of money from it. In a nut shell that is the entire motivation for dubious QC.

End of rant. Thanks for reading

__________________
...Tracy

'00 ML320 "Casper"
'92 400E "Stella"