Submariner1
Senior Member
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2016
- Messages
- 4,694
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- Location
- Windsor Berkshire
- Your Mercedes
- CL500 2009 5.5
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- Thread starter
- #221
No I don't wonder at all. That 80mm of steel might be 50p cheaper than the plastic moulding.
MB last year built something like 1.2 million cars, that's 600k£ saving on dipsticks alone as MB are really good at standardizing "incidental" parts. The door mirrors on your car are the same across all models in the range for instance. They were on the previous generation and the generation before that.
Most auto OEMs use their cost savings programs to pay for new model development, and it costs around £150 million to fully design and develop a new car. That money has to come from somewhere...
Good point, and if you scale that across a large no of parts !!! Becomes very significant.
Well some positive news on the oil overfill.
1 I just realised it had only done 460 miles with the oil too high not 600 as stated before (of which 340 miles were with me at mainly low revs)
2. I also heard from 3 engineers, who basically concurred, that of course it wasnt a good thing , but with only 0.7 litres too much on an 8.5 liter fill they would be amazed if it did any damage, and was unlikely to have caused frothing.
They also said my oil check instantly after switching the engine off , would have shown bubbles on the dipstick which it didnt, and would also have been seen in the clear syphon tube, which it didnt ..
So seems I got away with it.
BTW they did say if it was a smaller engine with say a 4.5 liter fill ... Then it could get marginal, but even then 2 said a lot of smaller engined cars without a dipstick come in overfilled that much and no damgae done.
2 said that possibly, the most likely thing that I might have done was slightly damaged the CAT, a tiny bit , but only to the extent it might fail a test, a few thousand miles quicker. But as its only done 5,600 miles per annum ... The Cat would still be a in a hell of a lot better state, than most cars of its age.