More car crap

In the continuing saga of my car, which began here and continued here, I picked up my car two weeks ago after they diagnosed the problems I’d been having as being due to a loose electrical connection. Last week, I was getting on to the highway, accelerating hard to catch up to traffic, when the car lost power momentarily. It didn’t die, but it noticeably hiccuped, and the check engine light went on. After that, the engine was misbehaving. The entire car was shaking noticeably at idle, and would shudder violently under acceleration. I hoped it would go away. Then the loss of power thing happened again, and the shaking got worse. I took it in on Monday.

They checked the engine error code, and found a blown ignition coil (which kept a spark plug from firing, which meant that one of the cylinders wasn’t firing evenly, hence the shaking. Something like that). They fixed it. However, they said that since they didn’t believe that this problem was related to the other electrical problems I’d been having, I could not claim a new car. I tried to make the point that the electrical system being screwed up could have damaged pretty much any component that had electrical power. They didn’t buy it. The service manager at the dealership allegedly spent a day talking to corporate headquarters, but they weren’t budging. Not related, not their problem. So I took the car back unwillingly.

Blech. Mercedes sucks.

One thought on “More car crap

  1. Blown ignition coil eh? Years ago when I had a 1994 VW Passat the engine would suddenly die. The car had 26,000 miles on it, just past the 2 year/24,000 bumper to bumper. VW was very very cool about it and fudged the record to have it fixed under warranty work. First they replaced the fuel pump, no dice – car died again on I-95 at 80mph during early morning commute. Ouf da. VW then decided it was the coil and replaced that, problem was cleared up.

    Thing is – if the coil fails and one of the cylinders doesn’t go, yes that will make the engine run rough, but won’t it smooth out under acceleration when the RPMs increase? The third cylinder was always problematic in my ’72 Beetle and frequently would die but always smoothed out under load.

    Clearly Mercedes teh sux0r for being such a bitch to you. I would trade the thing in, and upgrade to your old Saturn that runs reliably.

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