I have a 6 year old CLK which I bought from John R Weir in Aberdeen, Scotland. It has been regularly serviced there. I put it in for service and MOT a couple of weeks ago. I was horrified when I was told that the cost would be about £2000. The main item was the car needing a new rear drive shaft at a cost of about £1000. I believe this to be totally unacceptable for a 6 year old Mercedes with 65,000 miles on the clock. Neither John R Weir in Aberdeen or Mercedes are being helpful about this. I expect Mercedes to pay the full cost of the rear drive shaft repair and to pay towards some of the other repairs as well. I believe that there must be either a design fault or a manufacturing fault with the rear shaft for such an early failure to occur. This car has needed an excessive amount of repair work since it was purchased which I assume can be put down to the ongoing Mercedes quality problems.

Has anyone else had problems with such an early failure of a rear drive shaft? Thanks.

 

You might like to PM me with your real email address and I will swap notes with you.
Stuart

 

You might all be interested to know that this is ongoing. Apparently a failure of a rear drive shaft after 60,000 miles is considered acceptable by Mercedes. They have offered £200 as a "goodwill" gesture which means they expect me to fork out the £800, so there's not much goodwill there! John R Weir are making the problems worse with incorrect invoices.

 

Here's an update on my earlier posts. I have now had to replace both rear drive shafts on my 7 year old (60,000 mile) CLK 200. This is due to the failure of the ABS rings. It's cost me £2000!

Mercedes say that the corrosion found on the component is not uncommon given the age and mileage of my vehicle. They are prepared to do nothing to help me with the cost of the repairs. Frankly I think this is extremely poor as components like that should not fail in such a short space of time. I believe there is a reliability issue here which Mercedes are not admitting to.[/align]