W221 S320 Speedometer cluster going crazy

[keemaklan]

Hi guys,

Please can you watch the short video below and try and point me in the right direction as to what’s wrong with my car and what I need to do to repair it.

It’s already, in the past 6 weeks had about £5,000 thrown at it. Changed the glow plugs, the glow plug controller, the engine ecu, a gearbox ecu of some sort and had two brand new batteries put in.

The central locking basically doesn’t work at all. It was working fine prior to the “new” used ECU.

If I start the car and drive, then I may be lucky and the central locking may work the once. Return 30 minutes later however, and it won’t recognise any buttons being pressed at all. That’s from both working keys.

The speedometer cluster seems to switch on and off like a binary switch and the “clock” doesn’t seem to remember the time.


https://youtu.be/2GJ7ueJCJgg

Any suggestions?


Thank you all in advance.

8 years of FAULTLESS service, and 80,000 miles without as much as a hiccup from the car and suddenly the bills don’t stop. Perhaps this is my chance to get rid and upgrade to a W221 5.5 biturbo AMG.

[GreenV8S]

Most of that list of work has nothing to do with central locking and dashboards so I assume that was all addressing some other problems you haven't mentioned. Are any of these remaining problems a consequence of that work, or were they pre-existing? That will give you a clue where to look, and also whether the people who did that previous work are responsible.

Losing settings suggests you might be losing a permanent live feed when the vehicle is off which could be a simple wiring problem. Central locking not working might suggest some of the car's electronic components haven't been coded to the car properly.

[keemaklan]

Hi,

Thank you for your message.

All these problems began after the ECU was changed. I haven’t been back to the garage as of yet because i’ve been mega busy during Ramadan. I hope to take it back to them tomorrow to discuss and figure out what’s wrong, however I was hoping to go armed with a little information before I go so they can’t fob me off with any lies and accept no responsibility.

Prior to the ecu being replaced, the central locking/speedometer cluster worked perfectly fine. It’s obvious something has gone amiss.

Thanks again for your input,

Regards,

Fox.

[GreenV8S]

keemaklan said:

Prior to the ecu being replaced, the central locking/speedometer cluster worked perfectly fine. It’s obvious something has gone amiss.

I agree. Since they've worked on systems closely related to these problems and the problems started at that time, I don't see how they could possibly deny responsibility.