How the mighty have fallen (Merc CL500 content)

[The Reverend Bluejeans]

Look at this poor thing. Sat behind a filling station in Sheffield, last taxed in 2011, shagged air suspension, door trims removed and chucked inside the car, slowly gathering moss and grass growing up around it. Bloody shame.

 

[EssDeeWon]

I saw a big E class Merc of the same era sat on its arse the other week, didn't realise they had air suspension, that explains it. That car also looked un-used and pretty much doomed.

[gordonbennet]

We came close to buying one of these to replace the 124, it was 3 years old with less than 30k on the clock at the time.

 

That was till i spotted the chunks of rear wheel arches that had crumbled away, and the electrolytic corrosion in the alloy rear wings no doubt caused by the steel frame underneath.

 

Further enquiries discovered that a worn front bottom ball joint on some of these airsprung Mercs is part of the front shocker @ around £1100 a side, and the bloke who put me a new rear screen in for £400 (sounds bad but a bargain i assure you) said these CL back windows are over £2000 a throw, and the delaminate just like my bugger.

 

Bloody shame, one of the most beautiful coupes ever made IMO.

[EssDeeWon]

I know a chap who works at our local Merc dealer in the workshop, he used to tell me stories on an almost weekly basis about different failures regarding things falling off new Mercs, honestly it was like going back 30 years and chatting to a British Leyland mechanic.

 

One time he told me someone bought a new CLK, drove off and the integral rear brake light literally fell out of the back of the car LOL!!

[scooters]

I spent a miserable weekend working on a mates e220 of the same period as this car. The bean counters at merc had fucked up spectacularly in the early noughties by buying cheap low grade steel and throwing build quality control out of the window. With in the first year my mate with a 52 plate e220 had both wings and the front valence related under warranty due to catastrophic corrosion. Over the next 10 years just about every major panel was replaced due to major corrosion. I'm not talking a bit of surface rust either. Very sad because apart from the chappy diesel injector seals...A lovely job that! They are lovely cars. Merc still trade on build quality of 20 odd years ago just as VAG continues to trade on tje reliability of the mk2 Gowf

[Bren]

The cost of the parts alone makes these an uneconomical proposition to repair.

 

When i was at school in the 80's I remember seeing SD1's rotting at the side of the road all over the place - low value v high parts and labour meant many were finished before their 10th birthday.

 

P38 range rovers seem to have taken the SD1's place in this respect

[spike60]

I'm pretty sure they don't have air suspension, they have hydraulic. The ABC suspension is fitted to them, some S class, and SLs. It's similar to the air except less reliable and cheap to fix... ABC is active body control I think.

[spike60]

I think CL's also suffer from battery discharge and the wiring harness into the doors gives grief, perhaps why the door cards are off. A shame because they are lovely bits of kits but my balls just aren't big enough.

[cort16]

I always wondered why these seemed so cheap there's one local up for 3500

[Magnificent Rustbucket]

My brother had the saloon version in the early 2000s, an S500. It was an impressive car in many ways but turned out to be a complete dog sadly - catastrophically unreliable and with truly appalling build quality. The car was so bad it has put him off Mercedes ever since.

 

Having the damn thing constantly fixed under warranty and never knowing if it would start was frustrating (the car did actually strand him) but once out of warranty, so many things went wrong it was almost as if various parts of the car were queuing up to fail. Some of the bills the car produced were breathtaking. Thousands of pounds. I can't exaggerate how dreadful it was. Problems were not just limited to the A/C, suspension, electrical systems, electric seats and fragile trim, suspension failure and myriad problems with the brakes. It went badly rusty too - so much so it had holes in it at only a few years old. The car he had before it was a W140 S Class. That was a much better quality car, though itself by no means perfect. He traded the Mercedes in for an X350 shape Jaguar Super V8 in about 2006. That car war far of far superior quality and to be honest was a better in every way. They must be a real bargain if you can find one; his was great.

 

It is sad that this shape of Mercedes is so poor, because I think the coupe is one of the best looking cars Mercedes have ever made. They're genuinely beautiful.