Short version:
Got stuck Downtown Manhattan on Vesey St. while touring with a 2004 Sprinter wagon. I was coming from Montreal (400 miles away). Record high hot sticky day 10 days ago. Sunday afternoon, no open garage in sight. "Start Error" code showed up. Would not restart, not even a click. Got a boost from a yellow cab (if in that situation, don't bother asking large fleet taxis with ad on their top, or hybrid cabs - ask big old Crown Victoria without the ad as they may carry jump cables), nothing happened. Checked the fuses, all OK. Tried to pull/put back negative from the battery in many ways, nothing. Tried my extra key, then called a towing. Destination was MB Mahattan at 41st St and 11th Ave, as I've read on the forum that at that point, the only way out was the dealer. But the dealer was closed because it was Sunday. The towing guy was quite a character who whined quite a bit about the van behing so big and all. He first tried to jump start the van with his towing truck kit, nothing happened. After the van was safetied on to the town plateform, he drove the 50 blocks between Vesey and 42nd St. on an average of 12 mph. Took forever. Because the van was bus plated, I had it put at a tour bus layover area without time limit, on 11th Ave between 40th and 39th street. Nothing happened to the van during that night.
So we got to the service department at MB Mahattan the next morning. Explained it all. Then they "towed" the van in their garage area. I wasn't there at that very moment, but my guy told me it was quite a show. They took a brand new non-plated MB SUV, chained my van to it, and pulled the 158" wb Sprinter wagon to the second floor of the service bay, just like that. Just try to picture it: the van was 2 blocks from there, and they had to cut through the Lincoln Tunnel entrance. Good thing it wasn't 4 pm. OK, then I come down later and meet with Adam Havriliak, the service guy in charge of my case. Very nice guy. Then they started a process that will take 8 full days from start to finish. I have to say that T1N's peculiarities are not especially well knowned to the North American MB world. It's like they know how to read it, but it's kind of a totally obscured chapter of their history they never had to read about before, call it the Daimler-Chrysler era. Diagnosing the problem was a breeze (about 6 hours), diagnostic: immobilizer module (skreem) was fried and needed to be replaced. The rest took more than a week to come by. We were Monday. Because the faulty module was to be ordered from Texas and factory coded to match the van's VIN, I was told it would take until Thursday to arrive. So I decided to bring my customers home and do other things. I had an empty van coming down from Montreal and we were on our way during the night from Monday to Tuesday.
Apparently, the skreem mudule arrived as planned, but it didn't worked
. The replacement arrived the following Monday. Didn't work either. The way I understood the chain of event, that's the moment they realized the keys had to be re-coded too. And they didn't knew how. So with the help of engineers in Germany and one extra day, their efforts paid off. I left the dealership yesterday afternoon. Just before leaving, I met again with Adam again (a very nice guy by the way), who arranged to bill me only minimal hours compared to the sum of hours really invested in the case. I think that the end result was close to the number of hours it would have taken if they had really knew what they were doing at first. So $1300+ for an immobilizer module, a new battery and some hours of work (no details about the hourly cost on the bill, but a labor charge just over $800).
I wanted to share my experience with the forum cummunity because the way I see it, that kind of failure is not common. And it's one failure the next door garage will not address. Then, it was my first experience at a MB dealership. A very good experience considering everything. I would recommand MB Manhattan to anyone in case of emergency, but I'd also recommend travelling with the DAD, which I forgot home that time. Not sure if that would have helped me, but who knows...
Hope it helps.
Jef
