My recently acquired '97 C230 has approx. 140K miles on it. I have two questions:

- When the weather is pretty cold (below freezing), the transmission does not want to shift out of the low gears. It will shift, but only at higher RPMs. Once the car has warmed up a good bit (3 - 4 miles of driving), it seems to shift normally. Is this a common occurrence or a behavior I should be concerned about ?

- What is the service interval for the automatic transmission?

Thanks for your help...

slee

 

hmm i think i heard about this issue a few times but you should get the opinion of expert users.

 

The shifting is normal. The system is trying to "light off" the catalytic converters as quickly as possible by forcing the engine to rev to a high RPM.

 

Yes, this is very normal, these cars are designed for quick engine warm up, the fastest way to do that is to keep the tranny in lower gears for longer period of time. Yesterday here in western mass it was around 10 degrees, it took my C280 forever to shift out of lower gears for a while, I've noticed once the temp gauge starts to move above 40 degrees C the shift returns to normal. All pollution related stuff.