What has happened to Mercedes reliability?

I see reports of this too, but I have three recent MB cars (the oldest is December 2004) and there have been no problems with any of them apart from the C Class which had a damaged supercharger (damaged in the factory during fitting) that had to be replaced under warranty.

I know that the surveys that are done in the UK tend to rely on people reporting faults and I suspect that MB owners expect more and are likley to be more disappointed when a fault occurs and therefore more likely to give a bad review. I know that MB in the UK looked into the problems and found that a lot of the disatisfaction was dea;er related with the big groups for whom MB was just one franchise of many not giving as good customer service as the smaller specialist dealers. I think I have been lucky in this regard because although the dealer I use is quite large and has a lot of branches they only sell luxury brands and they do have quite high standards of customer care.

My A Class has done a high mileage and not been well looked after but it has never had any faults. The SLK has been trouble free too. I like the C Class a lot but the boot is too small so I am swapping it for an E Class. Having so many cars means that none of them do a high mileage and I never keep them long enough to need tyres or exhausts.

My 2001 CLK Cab (25K miles) has not, so far, given me any serious trouble and has never refused to start.

DAS

I have a 1983 240 Diesel that has about 90,000 miles on the odometer. The only serious problem I have had with it was the water-polluted diesel fuel sold in the US. I ordered that car from MBZ before it was built and I specified everything simple and mechanical - manual windows, manual sun-roof, etc. The simpler the car is and the less gimmicky, the more reliable it will be.

According to Consumer Reports many MBZs are now below average in reliability. I have heard comments that it mostly related to the untested "gimmicks" that they are building into them.