So finally my car runs the way it should, but it still hasn't been smogged yet.

Since I had no clue what was making my car run so horribly I decided to take it to a specialty Mercedes mechanic here in the city (San Francisco) called "Octane". This shop is terrific, they have an excellent facility, great staff, and understood where I was coming from. When I brought the car in I told them that I only needed them to diagnose the problem then I would work on it myself. One of the techs there knows the 400E inside and out and went through the car, checked all the systems and found out that it only needed new rotors, since it was an easy fix they installed them without any extra charged and got them for a good price. I would highly recommend them, they had older models (123's) as well as newer models (272's) in the shop.

Once I got it back from them it ran great but it just so happened that the water pump was going out and couldn't be smogged because of that, so last weekend I put a new one in, and had some minor issues related to that which can be found in another post. So now that's done which is great, and doing it myself saved about $850. Now though, the air pump needs to be replaced, the pulley bearing is going out, I just ordered one off mbpumps, I'll be doing that in a week or two, fun!

I called the new shop that's going to deal with the smog test under the CAP program and they said they can't touch the car until the California Budget passes since CAP won't have any funds until then, so at this point it's a decision for me as to wait until the budget passes, or apply for a smog exemption which I will get. Since my car at the moment isn't registered I'd like to do the exemption now but then will miss out on my $500 CAP money and since a car gets only one exemption in its lifetime if it fails next smog test I'm screwed. I'll probably just wait it out and drive with the expired tags.

So now going back to the first shop in which this all started, that mechanic said he took out and cleaned the cap and rotor which he then put back in the car, that was the main cause of this whole issue. If he never would have touched them I'm sure there would have been no issue whatsoever. Coincidently all this other stuff happened with the car which showed no signs of anything really going wrong, not even the water pump. Because of all this I don't think that I really have a case against him, a bit agrivating.

Luckily all of the cost went into the car parts with only a small percentage of the cost going into labor, so this whole situation while bad was not as bad as it could have been. But it's still not over...

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1992 Mercedes-Benz 400E
2002 Mercedes-Benz ML500