mercedes crap?

turbopete

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by feedback, do you mean customer complaints, or warranty claims, or how exactly is this quantified?? im pretty sure that if the general public knew of this and that complaining (even if you heard nothing more) would potentially improve the quality of what you buy, im sure more people would complain. especially outside of warranty!!!
 

Craiglxviii

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by feedback, do you mean customer complaints, or warranty claims, or how exactly is this quantified?? im pretty sure that if the general public knew of this and that complaining (even if you heard nothing more) would potentially improve the quality of what you buy, im sure more people would complain. especially outside of warranty!!!

By feedback I mean where a part has failed on a car (whether in or out of warranty) and it has gone into a main dealer or a franchised Indy who has ordered parts to carry out the repair. OEMs are very, very interested to know why their cars fail so they can fix the problem, and prevent brand integrity dilution in the marketplace.

This feedback goes into a big report that is collated and distributed monthly... some items are amusing, like Europe's most destructive carwash (in Nice) that had a roof brush that pressed down so hard it was ripping spoilers off- and that resulted in an Engineering Standards change to pull off force for several OEMs... to concerning, like curtain airbags deploying without impact (not a European or Japanese brand).

Complaining DOES have an influence for sure. But, it does depend on the company to whom one is complaining to act on it.
 

Westheath

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Wheel bearings if serviced correctly rarely give problems or fail.

However

Ensuring the vehicles mileage is correct and the servicing periods is essential.

Fake documents can give fake reliability impressions.

Timing chains and belts failing early because the mileage has been "corrected" is not uncommon in my experience.
 

pancholi

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A) the Japanese were the first to realise and pay attention to the 8.1 years, followed by the Americans.
B) Ze Germans tend to trade on their perceived value as much as their actual performance.
C) every car model made, ever, will have parts fail during its production lifetime. For the industry the accepted failure standard in general is 0.2%, as in two parts in every thousand will fail in their specified service lifetime. That is significantly better than what was achieved in (Western) car production until the adoption of Japanese quality standards in production and design in the late 70s and early 80s.

Now MB make just under two million cars per year, so of those they could expect that four thousand will see some form of failure resulting in customer feedback. Last year there were 4,081 failure feedback items...


odd how that 0.2% failure rate changes to 20% for W215’s :(
 

Craiglxviii

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yorkshire1

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Cars aren't designed in the hopes of selling spare parts. They're designed for a specific service life. Nowadays that is 8.1 years.

Interesting, Ive often wondered why for example they designed a bulletproof engine into a recycled washing machine body (thinking 210/202) that they knew would be junk when the engine was just nicely run in

I shall update the bearing saga when Ive a few more minutes
 

Craiglxviii

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Interesting, Ive often wondered why for example they designed a bulletproof engine into a recycled washing machine body (thinking 210/202) that they knew would be junk when the engine was just nicely run in

I shall update the bearing saga when Ive a few more minutes

It's one of those areas where the service life of one complex system (powertrain) is entirely disconnected from another (body in white).

Firstly one must realise that they didn't know the body would be junk. Far from it. From my digging into failure feedback and MBs engineering response over a number of years, it's quite clear that they put at least 4 engineering modifications in place to improve the market concern. Uncoated steel parts were substituted by galvanised ones, paint thickness and specification changed in different areas, body panel sealing increased in application area.

Part of it resulted from poor structure concept, like wheelarch return edges not meeting the open sided wheelarch liners properly, or sharp corners resulting in water traps forming. Part of it resulted in paint spec changing every 3 years as they voluntarily sought to stay at the forefront of EU environmental regs. Part of it resulted from increasing sales to customers not cleaning their cars as regularly as MB expected- this is noted several times.

Anyway. What that all means is that once one designs an engine to hit 100k miles, if one does a good job of it the same engine will hit 2-3x that. But, none of that has any bearing on how the body structure resists corrosion......
 

turbopete

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It's one of those areas where the service life of one complex system (powertrain) is entirely disconnected from another (body in white).

Firstly one must realise that they didn't know the body would be junk. Far from it. From my digging into failure feedback and MBs engineering response over a number of years, it's quite clear that they put at least 4 engineering modifications in place to improve the market concern. Uncoated steel parts were substituted by galvanised ones, paint thickness and specification changed in different areas, body panel sealing increased in application area.

Part of it resulted from poor structure concept, like wheelarch return edges not meeting the open sided wheelarch liners properly, or sharp corners resulting in water traps forming. Part of it resulted in paint spec changing every 3 years as they voluntarily sought to stay at the forefront of EU environmental regs. Part of it resulted from increasing sales to customers not cleaning their cars as regularly as MB expected- this is noted several times.

Anyway. What that all means is that once one designs an engine to hit 100k miles, if one does a good job of it the same engine will hit 2-3x that. But, none of that has any bearing on how the body structure resists corrosion......

regarding corrosion, i think a decent amount of it could have been prevented in the 210/late 202/early 203 if they had applied some of that rubberised 'stonechip' stuff around the wheelarch lips like they do (or at least did) on a lot of French cars. after all, in the grand scheme of things, especially in the late 1990s/early 2000s, regardless of how rubbish the cars were (especially the electrics) you seldom saw Peugeots, $hitroens or Renaults with wings/wheelarches rusting away at 5 or 6 years old!!!!

i actually saw a 1989/90 G reg Peugeot 205 last week. a run of the mill diesel one. no idea on the mileage, paint faded, door mouldings and wheeltrims missing in many cases, plenty of scratches that hadnt gone through to the metal, but NO RUST that i could see as it drove past! wheelarches and wings were faded, but pretty much perfect! on a 27 year old car. MBs of an era 10 years LATER rusted the arches in 7 years!!!
 

LostKiwi

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You'll never see a 90s Citroen with rusty arches - they were plastic!
 

Craiglxviii

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I have to admit, having come from VAG I thought the rust issues on the Vauxhalls and Fords I had in earlier years were behind me for good. Not so, it seems...
 

turbopete

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You'll never see a 90s Citroen with rusty arches - they were plastic!

fronts probably, im not sure they all had plastic rear arches though. not completely plastic at least. Peugeots and Renaults had few, if any plastic panels in the 90s, but were well splattered with the 'stone chip/stone guard' or whatever you want to call it (seems both names are used) and few, if any ever rusted! not unless they were silly old (well into the teens of years old) or were damaged to below the paint level
 
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yorkshire1

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It's one of those areas where the service life of one complex system (powertrain) is entirely disconnected from another (body in white).

Firstly one must realise that they didn't know the body would be junk. Far from it. From my digging into failure feedback and MBs engineering response over a number of years, it's quite clear that they put at least 4 engineering modifications in place to improve the market concern. Uncoated steel parts were substituted by galvanised ones, paint thickness and specification changed in different areas, body panel sealing increased in application area.

Part of it resulted from poor structure concept, like wheelarch return edges not meeting the open sided wheelarch liners properly, or sharp corners resulting in water traps forming. Part of it resulted in paint spec changing every 3 years as they voluntarily sought to stay at the forefront of EU environmental regs. Part of it resulted from increasing sales to customers not cleaning their cars as regularly as MB expected- this is noted several times.

Anyway. What that all means is that once one designs an engine to hit 100k miles, if one does a good job of it the same engine will hit 2-3x that. But, none of that has any bearing on how the body structure resists corrosion......


take your point about the supposed improvements made in certain bodyshell areas but Mercedes have been building cars for long enough to know how to put a properly designed one together in the first place .Surely head honcho in the relevant dept looks over said apprentice body designers shoulder and says matey thats no good like that itll be a moisture trap or whatever

Re arch liners the ones in the 202 are a complete joke its as if thats the only liner they had on the shelf and just said aaah itll be right bung it on. I mean even a monkey with no design sense couldve done better
 

Craiglxviii

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take your point about the supposed improvements made in certain bodyshell areas but Mercedes have been building cars for long enough to know how to put a properly designed one together in the first place .Surely head honcho in the relevant dept looks over said apprentice body designers shoulder and says matey thats no good like that itll be a moisture trap or whatever

Re arch liners the ones in the 202 are a complete joke its as if thats the only liner they had on the shelf and just said aaah itll be right bung it on. I mean even a monkey with no design sense couldve done better

Don't forget that body design has evolved continually and what was true 30 years ago is not so any longer. Cars are just not built and especially not designed the same way any more. Many things have improved...

...Profit margins haven't though and the competition is getting smarter. So that design manager will have been told, "Get your guys to save three percent of turnover of their parts this year by cost engineering them", and that's what happened.

On the 202 this was I believe the first open wheelhouse that MB used. So, they gained experience (slowly!) on it for their other models.
 

Botus

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8.1 years is the typical time that a first owner will keep his or her car nowadays. That is across all makes, models, segments and countries. So, it is the standard for which cars are now being designed.


well at 7.1 years BMWs all keel over and start dying,
the Merc maybe stretched a year more but bits dropping like flies now at less than 50k miles !!!
and these are older cars.... I believe the new stuff won't make 6

you don't appear to be including the learning curve, they started around 20 years ago designing cars to fail (lasting around 15 years and it has improved with time and 7 seems closer to the target...)

make them, die buy another (or lease hire as its called today)

I wouldn't be surprised when BM V8 all died then all the gearboxes fell to bits (much like 4matic ones) was the time it all started, they got such bad press, they just moved to special dying electrical modules that are a bit cheaper
 

turbopete

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agreed. seems like the 'premium' stuff lasts like Fords/Vauxhalls etc USED to, and that the Fords/Vauxhalls etc now outlast the 'premium' stuff, in many cases
 

Frontstep

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The public company is under constant pressure to make ever more money and a CEO is judged on that,
Sir Richard Greenbury was praised to the heavens at Marks & Spencer during his tenure.
They have not recovered since he left in 1999 he cut quality and raised prices I went into a local store with a shareholder, rack upon rack of creasy poor quality tat filled the sales floor she sold up.


Mercedes need to keep an eye on quality preferably both.
They reacted well to the abysmal quality problems of the late nineties into the early 2,000's.
 

Craiglxviii

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You seem to be under some misapprehension as to what & how cars were and are designed for.

Put simply, any vehicle- car, aeroplane, boat, ship or space rocket- is designed around a certain amount of use. The Type 23 frigates of the RN were designed with a hull life of 9 years for example. The Space Shuttle was designed for 100 launch/ reenty cycles.

Upto the advent of CAE and predictive failure analysis- around 30 years ago- cars tended towards "rule of thumb". Strengths were computed based on worst case conditions. For those OEMs that could afford it, the overengineering was liberally applied. As there was little in the way of electrics and most engines relied on mechanical carburetion this meant that as long as the car was kept clean, well looked after and maintained the only reason for failure would be mechanical. As in, either catastrophic failure or no failure. To make a car last for say 100,000 miles would require overengineering it to allow it to reach maybe 300k with cosseting and care.

That all changed with Ford bringing in computerised design. All of a sudden the failure modes could be computed far more accurately- and they were. Structures were made ever more elegant and refined- and fragile in comparison. They were also lighter, stiffer, faster and more responsive...

Now, even going back to the 30s automakers were not designing their cars to last "forever". They wanted to sell more cars to more people because they were very much not stupid...

So, pretty much as soon as the technology became available the overengineering (which cost a fortune) could be pared back but by bit. This pretty much coincided with increasing competition globally, adding more cost pressure. So, the non premium brands found it (comparatively) cheaper to make a car hit 100k than the premium brands did.

All of that doesn't take into account that the OEMs had to get in service performance data of these new structures. That happened market wide and wasn't confined to just premium german carmakers.

The nett effect of the change in included tech and design tech is that cars last much more closely to their intended service lives than before, but with many points of failure in the included tech (electronics mainly).

None of that is designing a car to fail. That simply doesn't happen.
 

Botus

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agreed. seems like the 'premium' stuff lasts like Fords/Vauxhalls etc USED to, and that the Fords/Vauxhalls etc now outlast the 'premium' stuff, in many cases


I think ford and Vauxhall are much better made than the premium german crap. Ok ambience maybe down a bit bit at least it starts and doesn't breakdown like BM Merc and VAG rubbish does...

all that profit is spent on marketing and image, my S class doesn't even drive anywhere near as good as a 100k mile Focus Mk2
 

Craiglxviii

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What do you mean by "better made"? Build quality? Gap and flush? System reliability? Corrosion resistance? Design?
 
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yorkshire1

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finally got round to write up
I hadnt realised merc hubs were pressure vessels knocked hub cap off and it shot 12ft across lawn thats a first!!still evidence of overheated grease about though

Next I see mercedes cant even afford thrust washers nowadays necessitating a ball end allen key to access the recessed pinch bolt for the hub nut.Nut wouldnt shift easily despite working it and once off threads had picked up ,bit odd, anyway rollers welded together. bearing cup spinning in so hub u/s.
Sourced a local s/h hub,complete, bearings were Japanese NTN whereas u/s one was SKF Brazil .stub axle threads cleaned up and now all good

On checking the other wheel it became evident what the issue originally could be as the wheel felt overly tight on spinning it and sure enough the outer bearing rollers were blued,so that one was replaced aswell,

Begs the question if car has dealer history at what point and who adjusted/overtightened by the looks of it both wheel bearings
 

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