Mercedes Benz S Class 500 Review

Overall Rating

Nice when it works.

Doesnt work, always faulty, poor build quality, expensive servicing, no customer support from Mercedes.

I purchased a 1999 Mercedes S500, bought from a Mercedes dealer, with full service history and Mercedes warranty. It had only done 50k miles when I purchased it 16 months ago and I was hoping for a reliable car that could take the 30,000+ miles a year I tend to do. Starting with reliability, so far the car has had more than 28 faults in the 20 months, including 3 roadside breakdowns leaving the car unroadworthy. The faults have ranged from suspension (4 bushes, air compressor, compressor relay all needing replacement) to electrics (3 x door mirror and central mirror adjustment, mirror heater, 4 x steering position adjustment, battery, phone, traffic indicator), engine (Engine Management system: O2 flow sensor, air mass sensor and fuel sender, flywheel sensor), heating (climate control unable to maintain warm temperature at speed) and bodywork (paint peeling on the bonnet). All this on a car that has primarily been used for sedate motorway driving! Design/Build Quality: It would appear that there are some significant design issues with suspension bushes failing between 50k and 80k miles (I don't know if any failed before 50k). Perhaps the suspension is under-designed for the weight of the vehicle. The fuel sender is a known issue that is claimed to be exacerbated by unleaded fuel. In general Mercedes cars are quite expensive to purchase, and particularly the S-Class. Normal expectation is that the higher end cars should be over-designed but this does not seem to be the case. The wide range and frequency of faults, give me the impression that the build quality of the S-Class does not align with reasonable expectations. This coupled with the very high maintenance and part costs (e.g. £150 for a car battery, about £300 for a set of spark plugs) make the prospect of buying a used S-Class untenable. It was suggested by the Mercedes, when complaining about the faults, that the S-Class is a complex car and I should therefore expect faults. Strangely, if this were true, we should be expecting 747 s to be falling out of the sky on a daily basis. It could be argued that if Mercedes cannot design, build and maintain a complex vehicle they should not be selling them. They should in fact, stick to something simpler that they can operate. Customer Service: As stated above, the car was purchased with a full Mercedes warranty and their breakdown protection (Mobilo-Life). It has a full service history, was previous owned by Mercedes and operated as a Fleet car. It has also been serviced by Mercedes Dealers ever since. Each time a fault has occurred the vehicle has been returned to the dealer to have the source of the fault determined. In general, however, the dealer does not have the required parts, the car needs to be collected, the parts ordered, re-booked and taken in again. By a quick rule of thumb for 20 faults over 16 months, equates to 40 bookings and 80 return trips to the garage in 16 months! To put it another way about a man month of time, just driving to and from the dealer! For a premier badge like Mercedes, for whom people are expected pay a premium, one would expect that this amount of faults would be totally unacceptable to them and that they should be pulling out the stops to resolve the situation. Not the case, the faults have been logged with Mercedes directly throughout the period, whose unceasing response is to talk to your dealer - even when it is evident that the dealer is not able to resolve the underlying problem. In essence Mercedes will not take responsibility for building an unacceptably poor vehicle and offer no resources to put it into an acceptable state. Sadly it is left to the customer to live with and arrange for each fault to be repaired reactively without any strategy for improving the overall situation. Mobilo-life roadside breakdown assistance has been used on a couple of occasions. On one of these occasions, the car was only a couple of miles from a Mercedes dealer and managed to limp (with 5 of the 8 cylinders shutdown) to a dealer. Mobilo-life said because the car had made it to a garage it was therefore not broken down and they could not provide a vehicle unless the car was driven (against the recommendations of the technician) away and left on the side of the road. Clearly this is a ludicrous situation and would have resulted in damage to the engine and catalytic converter, an additional towing fee to Mobilo-life and substantial inconvenience to the driver. At the end of the day the problem was again left to the customer to sort out with no transport with both the dealer and Mercedes blaming each other. It then took a further 24 hours of phone calls to obtain a temporary hire car. It seems that buying a used car from Mercedes is entirely at the owner s risk and no support can be expected if things go wrong. Given that the S-Class is one of their flagship models, one wonders how the rest of their models fair. I guess these sorts of reasons is why Mercedes are dropping so rapidly in customer satisfaction surveys like JD Power.