Mercedes is still chasing that legendary quality that it built its reputation on for so many decades. However, improving the brand’s image is made more difficult by recalls of hundreds of thousands of vehicles whose rear lights might stop working and cause a crash – they’ve been forced to call back 284,000 C300, C350 and C63 AMG models that were built between 2008 and 2011; 31,000 of them are from Canada, the rest from the US.
The reason for this large scale recall are some connectors at the end of the wires that power the rear lights. These can corrode in time, making the lights dimmer and dimmer, until they completely fade and fail.
According to the NHTSA, “Mercedes will notify owners, and dealers will replace the bulb holders if not previously updated and replace any corroded connectors, free of charge,” despite the fact that “parts are not currently available. Owners will be sent an interim notification in June 2014. A second letter will be mailed when parts are available.”
That’s expected to happen sometime in August or September of this year.
This comes as a follow-up to an earlier story which read NHTSA upgrades fire probe on 253,000 Mercedes C-Class models and it’s the recall it was bound to prompt.
By Andrei Nedelea
PHOTO GALLERY
