Here are the facts. I have a 1998 E320 Mercedes that has had a total of 3 rear window regulator failures. Note, that there are only two rear windows on this model, so one has failed twice. The first one failed after less than 25,000 miles and 10 open and closings and the dealer paid to fix that first one. The second failure of the other door was after the 50,000 mile warranty period so the dealer charged me $400 to fix that one. The one that was fixed for $400 failed again and this time I did not fix it, but applied "duct tape" to hold it up. That is a total of 3 failures.
It just happened that my neighbor used to live in Germany and had as a house guest, the manager from Germany in charge of Safety Feature Quality Control. I showed him the problem and he said that he would talk to the people back in Germany when he got back. Mercedes Benz never got back to me about the rear window problem. The window regulator is made by Busch. For the record, I have a total of 4 other American made cars with automatic windows and I have never had a failure on anyone of them.
I guess that you can not teach old dogs new tricks because I purchased another E320. It is a 2001 and wouldn't you know it? The left rear window regulator failed. I did not even waste my time with the Mercedes Benz dealer this time. I got out the "duct tape" and went to work on the window. The car is silver and so is the "duct tape", so it looks like a professional job that even Mercedes Benz would be proud of.
Are you starting to get the message? Today, I was back into the Mercedes Benz dealer and related my window failure history to him and asked if he has ever heard of the problem. I swear tow God that he sounded just like our President Obama. This was the first time that he had ever heard of the problem. The service manager did the "tap dance" for several minutes while I explained other problems. In all cases, this was the first time he had ever heard of the problems. I asked if there was some kind of system where he provided failure feed back to Mercedes Benz in Germany and he said that there was no such official system. Does that give you any confidence in Mercedes Benz? That may be one of the reasons that they lost WWII.
I am not finished yet. I had another problem with my 1998 E320 and that was with "rust". I have never had a car of any kind that had so much rust as this car. I have dug up bean cans that were buried in the ground for over 10 years that had less rust. We are talking about serious rust. One day, my wife had just parked the car in the garage and was walking out when the car seemed to have exploded. When I investigated the problem, I found that the spring purch had rusted off and the front wheel spring flew out. Had she been in line with the spring, it could have killed her. We are talking about a 10# spring that had about 1,000# of force on it flying out. I took the car back to the Mercedes Benz dealer and they refused to pay for or repair the problem. They did sell me a repair kit, but I had to fix the car myself. The fact that they had a kit, should have tipped me off that they knew all about this problem. After this fix, the car was fine except for all the rust. The car continued to rust until my wife refused to be seen in it. At that point, I put the car in the garage and started looking for a new car. One day it went to move the car out of the garage and noticed that one side was lower than the other. I suspected a flat tire, but when I checked, the spring purch on the other side had failed. At this point I wedged a block of wood into the area where the spring was so that the tire did not rub on the inside of the fender and drove the car to my old car scrap yard. The amazing thing is that after over 250,000 miles the engine still runs fine.
Hope springs eternal and I hope that the good people at Mercedes Benz will find it in their hearts to pay for the failures to my 1998 E320 and admit that they were the cause of my problems.
PS----The story does not end with the 1998 E320. I purchased a 2001 E320 with about 85,000 miles. The car looked brand new and it appeared that no one had ever sat in the back seat. After about 10,000 miles and still no one sitting in the back seat, the left rear window regulator failed. Per my wife, she had only rolled the window down by accident. Count this up as failure #4. Mercedes Benz, where are you?????
PS---Well, now it is 100%. The other rear window in my 2001 E320 has failed. That makes it 100% for the rear windows in two different E320's. Do you think that it would take a mathematician to figure out that Mercedes has a problem with their E320 rear windows. Remember that it had two failures of one rear window in my 1998 E320. Mercedes only paid for "one" rear window repair out of the five. Who thinks that Mercedes should correct the problem with my E320 rear windows? Let me know or contact Mercedes directly.
