No Tony, it's a C180k Coupe, 2004 model. The spring had lost about 40mm off the end and from the look of it, it had been broken for a long time. The A Class has a really bad reputation, at least in the UK as teh build quality doesn't seem to be up to the expected Merc standard. A friend bought one brand new for his daughter and in the 2 years she had it, for 17 months of that she had a loan car from the dealer as it was back in having just about everything replaced.
That's too bad, not good for MB's reputation. And it's not what we experienced.
My wife's is A190 from 2000, imported from Switzerland. I picked it up on the same trip when I picked up the RR in Frankfurt.
The baby benz has done now 54000 km (the model A190 has never been imported in Holland so pretty rare here), it's an autobox and ideal for citytraffic.
When I picked it up it had been sitting for 6 months with dirty oil in the box, the solenoids were sticking and shifted not good.
A local transmission shop fitted new solenoids and flushed her, since then no problems or whatsoever. We are happy with it, use it mostly for grocery's.
In the past year I'm finding so many cars of friends have failed on broken springs, I think the material quality now is s^*#,,,, last one I changed on a 407, had acted like a knife and basically removed the tyre from the rim on the inside,, at least we don't have that problem running on air
I wonder whether it's actually material quality. I think it's more likely to be the cr@p state of our roads these days giving wheels, tyres, suspension, exhaust mounts etc a hammering they were never designed to take.
The roads round here are starting to resemble what the would have been in the early 1900s with the top dressing breaking away, potholes everywhere and the splash and dash point repairs failing after a month or two.
The Mondeo we had for a few weeks had two rear springs in that time. The car had 63k miles and was a 58-plate.
It also had a knackered and completely worn out seat mechanism that allowed the drivers seat to be lifted at least two inches.
Then it had coil pack failure and a serious missfire as well as a bunch of other issues.
My previous Focus hit 150k and never needed a suspension spring to be changed. It didn't have a failed coil pack until 145k either.
I think new/modern cars are just shitty quality in general.
RutlandRover wrote:
The Mondeo we had for a few weeks had two rear springs in that time. The car had 63k miles and was a 58-plate.
It also had a knackered and completely worn out seat mechanism that allowed the drivers seat to be lifted at least two inches.
Then it had coil pack failure and a serious missfire as well as a bunch of other issues.
My previous Focus hit 150k and never needed a suspension spring to be changed. It didn't have a failed coil pack until 145k either.
I think new/modern cars are just shitty quality in general.
I've had a few mondeos - they all seem to eat springs much more than other car I've had does. Though quality does generally seem to be an issue across many of them as well.