5th Jan 2019, 21:58

Mercedes or any other manufacturer cannot really ask (that's not the correct word for it, but the right word escapes me at this time) owners to deny problems - this isn't Third World politics. People buy a product with certain brands with particular expectations, especially when the product is expensive. And buyers know when something is amiss, regardless of what the factory says.

German taxi drivers who religiously bought Mercedes E-class cars as taxis since the 1950s, started buying Opels and Audis in the late 1990s because they started having problems with the new E-class cars, and private buyers were buying the last of the W124 (aka 260E/300E) cars which were far more dependable.

Remember though, in places like North America, the only Mercedeses sold are always the highly-specified, very powerful, and very complicated models which have components that will fail in time and expensive to fix. In those markets, they do not have the common, garden-variety bread-and-butter models that are used as rep or company vehicles. No (or the odd) 4-cylinder car with a manual gearbox, always with electric leather seating rather than durable cloth with manual adjustments. Are there Mercedes models that last 100K mi (or 160K km) without a problem - or only minor things that happen on normal cars? There will be, but nowhere near as many as when Mercedes was infinitely dearer and more sparsely equipped (but when money was put into the engineering and durability of components) in decades past.

Mercedes is not the Rolex standard it was a while ago, I see no real prestige in Mercedes (their cars stylistically also look ugly these days), only complication. A Range Rover to me is more consistent with prestige where the entire product is well-designed and does not challenge anyone's aesthetic sense. Pity about absolute reliability, but at least if you could afford to own or repair one, everything else is there, which is not something I can say about late-model Mercedes cars.

In the true build quality, reliability and dependability sense, the brand that is most like the "real" Mercedes of yore, is Lexus. Buy it, run it, service it, and it will not break. The way you see African Mercedes W123 taxis with 800K km. But it's not truly a Mercedes replacement, because what's missing in Lexus and Toyota is true innovation, rather than just adapting other makers' features and "making them better," and also their design (inside and out). I dare say that Hyundai, Genesis, and Kia designs are far more coherent and less of an eyesore.