OK, I want to chime in here. MB quality has gone downhill in a lot of cases. This is established. You will not get any arguements from me. There are a few improvements. The '05 ML's are now built like tanks. What was once literally the worst SUV on the road is now truly one of the best. Build quality and reliability are way up. Just in time to introduce a new model with new gizmo that will probably suck as bad as the 98's did.

But I digress. There is a lot of dealer service bashing based on percieved inability of the service personnel to fix cars. This is simply not the case (well, a lot of the time). Most techs that make to into a MB facility are the upper echelon in their profession. They have to go to tons of school, need major amounts of computer knowledge and are generally respinsible for retaining an exponentiallly higher amount of data than techs for competing brands.

A major part of the problem lies in MB's warranty times and procedures. The times have gotten cut to the bare bones. Getting MB to pay for essential operations such as road tests and in depth electrical testing is a huige challenge. My techs get paid for only what they do. MB gives a labor operation and a certain amount of time for them to do it. Hypothetically, lets say you've got a warning light on. MB will pay, let's say, .5 hrs for the tech to diagnose this. In that time, my tech has to go out to the lot, find the car, pull it in, put it up on a rack, hook up the diagnostic equiptment, run the codes and observe a few values that the sensors are putting out. This is nearly impossible in and of itself. Now the computer shows a fault for a component. This may mean a few things. Most likely, that component is bad. But it could be wiring related. It could be a faulty signal from another sensor that falsely points to this component. It may be low battery voltage. There are a myriad of possible causes. Now, MB just wants to see the printout of the faults and values to justify the replacement of the part. These policies, as well as the lack of adequate diagnostic time has created a culture of parts changers. This is unfortunate, as they are all capable of the in depth diagnosis to hit the nail on the head, but no one will pay them for it. Techs are not going to work for two hours to properly diagnose a problem for free when other work is waiting and MB will pay them anyways. So the biggest complaint in the auto industry now comes to light. "It was not fixed right the first time". And if it was, it was a fluke, as the proper procedure could not have been followed without superhuman speed and powers of deduction. We in the business are no happier about any of this than the customers. It is hard to take pride in a job that you are doing half-assed because you need to to survive. Techs are making less and less money every year as it is. I spend my days making excuses to customers about why their more expensive MB breaks down ten times as much as their Lexus/Infinity.

But wait, there's more. Now say we get one of these problem car (whose frequency is becoming more and more alarming). All the common fixes don't seem to help. The codes don't point to much. MB has simply not made an adequate level of technical resources available to the techs to get to the bottom of strange electrical "gremlins". We can't simply turn a customer away and say, "sorry, we can't fix it". It goes against the dealer charter. So oftentimes my techs are left to hunt around in the dark for answers that MB does not have, and in essence, work as cheap field engineers. MB's technical assistance center is sometimes as clueless as we are about strange problems. Then they start to occur more and more. Then the bullitens start coming. "If you have symptom X with component Y, do not replace component Y, or you will be debited. There is no repair at this time. Please wait for further updates". Which can take weeks, even months. Meanwhile, Joe ******* over here in his brand new $80K base model show off to the neighbors S Class has to drive around with Nav or a functioning radio. We could put in another and it would work. Maybe not forever, but it would make the customer happy. They all get rebuilt in the end anyways. But no help, just more bad blood spilled onto me, the front line of defense.

Sorry to rant here, but it's too easy to just blame the dealers as oftentimes it's not their fault. There are problems higher up that are not being addressed. I love MB cars, have owned many, many of them iver the years. They were at one time the best vehicle hands down that could be purchased at any price. I want to see those days again. If you're still reading, thanks for listening. Vented a little frustration there....