Before his wife inherited a 2013 Mercedes C300 a few years ago, our columnist hadn't owned a luxury car. Now he's finding out the cost of coming to like it. This is not his car.
Courtesy MercedesI grew up in a family that prided itself on buying cheap cars. I learned how to drive on a 1963 Rambler station wagon. My dad was so thrifty he ordered it without the optional radio or heater. Good thing we lived in Southern California.
After I married in 1981, I tried to follow in his footsteps. Our first purchase was a new Honda Civic for $5,600. I ordered it without air conditioning despite living in California’s Imperial Valley where the thermometer tops 110 degrees in the summer.
Over the years, we began buying bigger, more expensive cars, and yes, they had air conditioning. But we never bought a luxury car. Our last new car, which we still own, was a 2014 Toyota Highlander.
So it was a shock four years ago when my wife inherited a 2013 Mercedes C300. Never mind that the used Mercedes wasn’t worth any more than the Toyota sitting in our driveway.
A bigger shock: I quickly got to like the Mercedes. It corners much better than any car I’ve ever had, has a powerful V-6 engine, and is more fun to drive than the pragmatic American or Japanese cars that we’ve owned.
Yet there were early signs the Benz wouldn’t be a cheap car to own. Once I blew out a tire simply driving over a bumpy New Jersey road. I learned the car had low-profile tires that gripped the road better but were more fragile. Another time a jammed water bottle disabled a power seat.
Still, the Mercedes was generally trouble-free. Until it refused to start one day recently. Strangely, the next morning it did.
I drove it to our mechanic and asked him to put in a new battery and check all the electrical connections. Did I mention a new battery on a Mercedes costs $300?
As I drove home, the car started acting weird again. The dashboard display went blank and the indicators for the high beams and emergency brake started blinking as if possessed.
We eventually took it to the dealer. The news wasn’t good. Water had gotten in our electrical system and corroded some cables.
How had water gotten in the cables? Well, the most likely suspect was clogged sunroof drains. I never use our sunroof—and now it had ruined the electrical system.
Even worse, the dealer didn’t know how bad the damage was and said we would have to pay an additional $2,000 to have the car’s interior taken apart so that its wiring harness could be inspected.
And yet our friend was right about feeling less safe even after being vaccinated. Something essential has changed that no vaccine can reach.
LIVING IN RETIREMENT
It got worse. If the car required a new wiring harness, it would have to be custom-built and would cost around $20,000, twice as much as the eight-year-old car was worth. Maybe we were better off selling the car to a junkyard and cutting our losses.
It was an emotional decision. My wife had inherited her Mercedes from a dear friend and wasn’t ready to let go of it. We gave the go-ahead for the dealer to take the interior apart. The dealer determined that the problem could be fixed with some new parts. Total cost of the repair, including disassembly and reassembly, was $5,300. That’s not $20,000, but that’s a lot of money.
If we can get a couple more years out of the car, I would consider it money well spent. We got the car free and it has been our main transport for four years, and this is the first time we spent major money on it.
Still, lesson learned. From now on, when I take it to the mechanic, I’m going to ask him to change the oil—and check the sunroof drains.
Write to retirement@barrons.com
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April 18, 2021 at 07:00PM
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A Luxury Car, an Expensive Repair, and a Lesson in Checking Sunroof Drains - Barron's
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