Mercedes r230 SL500 titivation
Discussion
My younger brother decided that the easiest way to be rid of his surplus-to-requirements Mercedes r230 SL500 was to give it to me. If I tell you that it's replacement is a McLaren 720S (below) you may appreciate why selling it is really too much of a chore, thus allowing fraternal goodwill to triumph. Thank you, PR.
The car has been standing a while, before which it had a good going over at MB at a cost well into four figures, almost half way to five. Nonetheless, more will be required: these cars do not like standing around. I picked it up on the snowiest day of the year but happily it is on Kumho winter tyres:
Less happily, neither the ABS nor the ESP were working. And yet it handled the conditions with aplomb. It is all about the tyres. I digress: the winter tyre thread is infinitely long and just as boring. It was also showing a parking brake warning and consumer and starter battery warnings. Subsequently I have noticed the nearside headlamp is intermittent. And my brother had warned me that the central locking does not work. And the rear wheel arches are rusty. It is such a handsome car, however:
It has a fairly bone dry spec. It is 359 Tanzanite Blue Metallic over Grey leather; the only options that I can see are Avior 18" wheels and parktronic. It is presently on the far nicer Homan 17" standard wheels but I have the 18 inchers and they are shod with pukka Pirelli P-Zero Rosso tyres with plenty of meat on them. The boys and I cleaned them up today. Having two little helpers makes this kind of job so much easier.
I have the consumer battery on charge. If this doesn't make it right, I suspect the battery control module is kaput (thanks to a forum member for pointing me in that direction). The batteries are under warranty so if they are bad (they were replaced six months ago, so it seems unlikely) I will have MB change them. Otherwise I will just put it in to Baister and have him fix it. The problem is, Baister is midway through the suspension rebuild on my r129 SL which he has interrupted to sort out the disasters on my w124.
The ABS/ESP problem may just be a side effect of the battery issue; if not it is probably a bad reluctor ring somewhere. A Baister job.
The headlamp is a bad burner: £200+.
The PSE pump is the culprit for the locks: boringly expensive. Rebuilt ones are hawked at £650 on eBay.
Then I will have the Man do the wheel arches. Then I will give it to my wife to use for summer specials for a while. If she gels with it, we'll keep it, but I suspect it will be up for sale in the late summer. I don't really have the necessaries to titivate it and keep it.
My brother brought over the documents from the r230 in his McLaren today. What a machine! It is from another dimension. He took me out for a ride in it, a mere 99miles on the clock, it is quite beyond description how it goes. He then took my boy out. Then he had to take everyone else in the universe out. I was a little nervous about all this but he seems a good deal more responsible and restrained than yours truly: I think he's a bit frightened of it, which is very sensible indeed.
Back to Mercedes. The documents are complete. It had one owner prior to my brother. It has a proper full service history with all of the invoices from the main dealer; all of the MOTs; all of the correspondence from the dealer; the first owner even kept articles from Autocar. There have been some eye-watering bills for electrical and suspension related things. I am not convinced these cars were fully resolved before they were let loose on the public. Had I been the first owner, I would have been mightily disappointed, especially having paid £69,780 for it in 2003; my brother bought it for £12k in 2013, buy which time it had only 65k miles on it (it now shows just over 101k miles).
I also did a bit of buying on eBay. I love brochures and stuff, especially from the American market:
My wife found out about it today...
The car has been standing a while, before which it had a good going over at MB at a cost well into four figures, almost half way to five. Nonetheless, more will be required: these cars do not like standing around. I picked it up on the snowiest day of the year but happily it is on Kumho winter tyres:
Less happily, neither the ABS nor the ESP were working. And yet it handled the conditions with aplomb. It is all about the tyres. I digress: the winter tyre thread is infinitely long and just as boring. It was also showing a parking brake warning and consumer and starter battery warnings. Subsequently I have noticed the nearside headlamp is intermittent. And my brother had warned me that the central locking does not work. And the rear wheel arches are rusty. It is such a handsome car, however:
It has a fairly bone dry spec. It is 359 Tanzanite Blue Metallic over Grey leather; the only options that I can see are Avior 18" wheels and parktronic. It is presently on the far nicer Homan 17" standard wheels but I have the 18 inchers and they are shod with pukka Pirelli P-Zero Rosso tyres with plenty of meat on them. The boys and I cleaned them up today. Having two little helpers makes this kind of job so much easier.
I have the consumer battery on charge. If this doesn't make it right, I suspect the battery control module is kaput (thanks to a forum member for pointing me in that direction). The batteries are under warranty so if they are bad (they were replaced six months ago, so it seems unlikely) I will have MB change them. Otherwise I will just put it in to Baister and have him fix it. The problem is, Baister is midway through the suspension rebuild on my r129 SL which he has interrupted to sort out the disasters on my w124.
The ABS/ESP problem may just be a side effect of the battery issue; if not it is probably a bad reluctor ring somewhere. A Baister job.
The headlamp is a bad burner: £200+.
The PSE pump is the culprit for the locks: boringly expensive. Rebuilt ones are hawked at £650 on eBay.
Then I will have the Man do the wheel arches. Then I will give it to my wife to use for summer specials for a while. If she gels with it, we'll keep it, but I suspect it will be up for sale in the late summer. I don't really have the necessaries to titivate it and keep it.
My brother brought over the documents from the r230 in his McLaren today. What a machine! It is from another dimension. He took me out for a ride in it, a mere 99miles on the clock, it is quite beyond description how it goes. He then took my boy out. Then he had to take everyone else in the universe out. I was a little nervous about all this but he seems a good deal more responsible and restrained than yours truly: I think he's a bit frightened of it, which is very sensible indeed.
Back to Mercedes. The documents are complete. It had one owner prior to my brother. It has a proper full service history with all of the invoices from the main dealer; all of the MOTs; all of the correspondence from the dealer; the first owner even kept articles from Autocar. There have been some eye-watering bills for electrical and suspension related things. I am not convinced these cars were fully resolved before they were let loose on the public. Had I been the first owner, I would have been mightily disappointed, especially having paid £69,780 for it in 2003; my brother bought it for £12k in 2013, buy which time it had only 65k miles on it (it now shows just over 101k miles).
I also did a bit of buying on eBay. I love brochures and stuff, especially from the American market:
My wife found out about it today...
OK, I'm getting the message about reliability and quality and batteries in particular. The service history on mine suggests it has had all of these problems: there are bills for numerous ABC struts and valves, for taking the seats out to replace some module or other, for stripping the door trim for a different module, and then battery after battery. There was also a cat way back when. The present batteries are less than a year old and under warranty. Here is the consumer battery on my office floor at this very moment. It has been charging at least ten hours now...
I've just stuck the consumer battery back in there after 16hours on charge and it is still showing the errors. There was no sparking at all when I connected the battery up. I suspect it is finished. Off to the Merc dealer when I get a chance.
P R N D said:
The real issue with the R230 is that it was packed full of electronics right at the time Mercedes was scrimping on quality.
Precisely this: coupled with a massive expansion in the range and sophistication of electronic systems.
I could not get the battery fully charged and the car remains troubled. I have taken it home to park it out of harm's way while I get the 124 and 129 back on the road. As soon as the 124 is up and running I am going to get the 230 to the main dealer. They have already indicated that if the batteries are caput they will replace them under warranty.
Strela said:
The Bitter I've just bought...
Wait a minute. Hold on. Woah. You've bought a Bitter? Without telling anyone? Come on man, we need a thread about this. "Titivating my Bitter Obscura". And you thought getting the parts for your Mercedes was tricky.And wait another minute. What's this anti-timber s
t? Nobody makes real wood look like plastic quite like Mercedes.I pulled the car into the tip that is my garage last night and had a go at cleaning up the interior. I used a Bit Hamber Surfex HD solution everywhere. My brother used to smoke and he either chuffed on his cancer sticks or on those ridiculous vapes in this car. Plus he has a little dog which has been in it.
I quite like the design aesthetic. The cluster in particular is rather nice. A bit fiddly and precious but nice all the same. The swooping centre console is pleasing and the faux-leather surface on the dash and door trims I don't mind at all.
The ergonomics are a step back from the 129, however. In particular, I find the clustering of switches in single units really inferior to the previously used system separate switches. The latter are easier to find without taking your eyes off the road. Nor do I like putting the window, seat heating and boot switches in the door card. They are harder to operate than on the console and, of course, unavailable to a passenger. The switches themselves are cheaper and have less of a substantial feel. Many of them have the same position whether on or off. I have noticed that some of them (the gear selector switch for example) are gummed up. All of this is about making a car cheaper to manufacture at the expense of longevity and ease of operation.
Visibility is inferior to the 129 but hardly bad. You sit lower in the 230 and the rear of the car rises up and wraps round you much more than in the 129. It is a good job it has parking bleepers. Of course, the 'A' pillars are bigger than the 129's and the screen rake is compromised to accommodate the folding top (you will have noticed that in order to make the top feasible, the top of the screen effectively provides the front of the roof).
The shell feels stiffer, although not much, and the driving feel is more direct than in the 129.
The hard plastics around the bottom of the seats are just unforgivably cheap and nasty. Hard, thin, sharp, flimsy, they are a disgrace. The door bins seem to have worked loose.
I can't really fault the seats but then I haven't driven very far in them. The absence of jump seats in the back is major marketing faux pas, I would have thought.
In short: it has its merits but it is of far inferior quality to earlier products. Which you can say about pretty much any car produced after 2000.
I quite like the design aesthetic. The cluster in particular is rather nice. A bit fiddly and precious but nice all the same. The swooping centre console is pleasing and the faux-leather surface on the dash and door trims I don't mind at all.
The ergonomics are a step back from the 129, however. In particular, I find the clustering of switches in single units really inferior to the previously used system separate switches. The latter are easier to find without taking your eyes off the road. Nor do I like putting the window, seat heating and boot switches in the door card. They are harder to operate than on the console and, of course, unavailable to a passenger. The switches themselves are cheaper and have less of a substantial feel. Many of them have the same position whether on or off. I have noticed that some of them (the gear selector switch for example) are gummed up. All of this is about making a car cheaper to manufacture at the expense of longevity and ease of operation.
Visibility is inferior to the 129 but hardly bad. You sit lower in the 230 and the rear of the car rises up and wraps round you much more than in the 129. It is a good job it has parking bleepers. Of course, the 'A' pillars are bigger than the 129's and the screen rake is compromised to accommodate the folding top (you will have noticed that in order to make the top feasible, the top of the screen effectively provides the front of the roof).
The shell feels stiffer, although not much, and the driving feel is more direct than in the 129.
The hard plastics around the bottom of the seats are just unforgivably cheap and nasty. Hard, thin, sharp, flimsy, they are a disgrace. The door bins seem to have worked loose.
I can't really fault the seats but then I haven't driven very far in them. The absence of jump seats in the back is major marketing faux pas, I would have thought.
In short: it has its merits but it is of far inferior quality to earlier products. Which you can say about pretty much any car produced after 2000.
It has stood up quite well. Certainly, no holes. There is the usual black creasing on the outer bolster of the driver's seat: I always find that it is worse after cleaning. It is not the lovely nappa leather of my late-model 129 but it is certainly a lot nicer quality than you'd find in a C- or E-Class. If it ever stops raining, I'll get it cleaned up inside and out and do some nice photos.
I haven't had the chance to form an attachment to it. I do think it a handsome car; and it drives really beautifully. It is much more sporty (whatever that means) than my r129. Although it has the same engine and transmission, it has a faster diff and sharper gearbox programming. It also makes a nice noise.
OK, ok. £2.5k. But these are its faults:
Leaky boot seals.
Central locking pump fried.
Roof not working and water damage to pump.
Battery charging fault, possibly battery module.
Intermittent n/s xenon lamp.
SBC pump fault.
ABS/ESP sender fault.
Bubbling/rust on both rear arches, boot lid, both doors.
It seems a shame to let it go for so little (although it is a lot of money to me) but I don't need it, don't love it and have neither the time nor the money to get it right. And those pictures flatter it.
Still, it drove beautifully on the way up to town.
Leaky boot seals.
Central locking pump fried.
Roof not working and water damage to pump.
Battery charging fault, possibly battery module.
Intermittent n/s xenon lamp.
SBC pump fault.
ABS/ESP sender fault.
Bubbling/rust on both rear arches, boot lid, both doors.
It seems a shame to let it go for so little (although it is a lot of money to me) but I don't need it, don't love it and have neither the time nor the money to get it right. And those pictures flatter it.
Still, it drove beautifully on the way up to town.
Mrs R came up to town to pick us up.
In the meantime, boy one and I spunked some of the proceeds (£10 each) in the Quayside market. among other things I bought some usefully out-of-date Michelin maps of France (1980 map of Caen-Paris particularly good value at £1); the boy bought a DVD entitled "The Vulcan Year" and a tub of black slime. The latter provided great delight on the journey home when boy two realised that by jabbing his fingers sharply into the tub, a delicious farting noise could be evoked. But not as much delight as my innocent remark, "Well, we have an empty slot in the yard...".
As I drove us all home in the 190, I reflected on how much I love a proper car.
In the meantime, boy one and I spunked some of the proceeds (£10 each) in the Quayside market. among other things I bought some usefully out-of-date Michelin maps of France (1980 map of Caen-Paris particularly good value at £1); the boy bought a DVD entitled "The Vulcan Year" and a tub of black slime. The latter provided great delight on the journey home when boy two realised that by jabbing his fingers sharply into the tub, a delicious farting noise could be evoked. But not as much delight as my innocent remark, "Well, we have an empty slot in the yard...".
As I drove us all home in the 190, I reflected on how much I love a proper car.
Gassing Station | Readers' Cars | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff