Mercedes E320 CDI S211, Shite or Shiteable?

[Snake Charmer]

Just occasionally I look at Faecesbook and one of the Mercedes groups I look at had a pair of rear door cards for a saloon in the same colour as the ones I removed with sun blinds in for £400.  There's another pair on Ebay for £312.68.  I would have happily parted them for with £20-£30 each!! I was tempted to disassemble the old ones and see if I could retrofit the upper section then vinyl paint the beige/mushroom colour to grey as they would make a nice addition to the child booster seats in the Designo rear seats I will be fitting.

I was chatting to someone about the faults this car had when bought, one of which was the black dash @bobdisk and I rectified and how it had been fautless since November 2023. Shortly after that a fault came up on the dash........

Seems to have cleared as a Canbus fault, could be as I have the head unit connected to the Canbus via a length of speaker cable and not a twisted pair of OE cables.

Talking of faults, the brake light switch has been throwing the occasional code and despite reading back through this thread I cannot remember if I swapped the brake light switch over from the old car permanently but I'm sure I tried it whilst diagnosing the SBC faults. A buzzing relay in the rear when the SBC pump runs seems to coincide with the fault appearing so I will try swapping the switches before rushing out to buy a new one.

Bluetooth connectivity seems to have settled to consistent with the Xtrons Android head unit. Waze starts automatically every time but not always with the same options on screen, sometimes I get the work/Hhome option depending which location I am at, other times I get the list of recent trips. BBC iPlayer does not always come up and I have to go searching, other times a split screen with Waze comes up with the station and I have to just press play. On a couple of occasion I have had this split screen, iPlayer has started on it's own and Waze gives me my choice of work/home home destination to select just hit yes so not sure why the connectivity is slightly different every time.

BBC radio 2 has a much better depth of sound through iPlayer than the FM radio, the amplifier is far better on this unit than the old one and probably up with the OE head unit so I'm pleased with that side of things. The expensive reversing camera has been faultless since fitting and should help me save damaging the rear bumper and tailgate that will be going in for paint next week hopefully. I squeezed the car into an unfeasibly small space last week on a bend as I was able to get close at the rear. I will eventually be investing in a front camera from the same company at some stage as the night vision is excellent as I have to paint the front bumper too.