Buying review Mercedes-Benz S-Class (W222) 2013-2020 Common Issues Engines Inspection

Thanks for watching another car buyers review, today we will go over the last generation of the Mercedes-Benz S-Class. This car has the internal code of W222 and was built between 2013 and production ended in september of 2020. If you want the best car in the world but do not want to pay top dollar than listed to this video.

The production of this car was mostly done in Asia, offcource there was also a factory in Sindelfingen Germany for the European market, other locations were India, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. This car was again full of the latest technology that brings the car far ahead of the competition, as always many new technology and safety features debut on this car. I will give you a small overview of new gadgets, first of all this car was equipped with new fiber technology since some of the driving assistants operate at a high speed of data transfer. The car also has an atom processor for the command online control interface. The car has the ability to drive autonomously while scanning the road ahead and preparing the shocks for impact on the road ahead. The system uses GPS to calculate the route, the front facing camera’s scan the road and rely information to the active body control system. This should result in the smoothes ride ever.

All this comes at a price, the car is full of technology, electronical gadgets, ECU’s, CPU’s and lots of wires. In 15 years this car might be a mechanics nightmare, but since these cars are still relativly new, for the near future I do not see any trouble. Let’s inspect the car a bit further. The car is available with many engines, diesel, petrol, hybrid. There is 1 inline 4 cylinder engine available for the S350 that was only available for China. The diesels are all inline 6 cylinders with a turbo charger, the petrol engines range from inline 6 to bi-turbo v8 to a v12 in the maybach-mercedes. The AMG models are the S63AMG and the S65AMG.

There are two transmissions available both automatic, the 7G and 9G tronic, designed for comfortable driving and these transmissions can handle the torque of the high performance cars as well.

Reliability wise the S500 and S550 have the M278 engine block that is quite reliable, this engine has a good track record of offering good performance and durability. The other engines have not such a long track record which makes it difficult to determine the reliability over time, these newer engines are built with the HOT v construction. The turbochargers are places on top of the cylinder head. This approach is also made by AUDI. This safes space in the engine bay.

There are reports of the start button not working in the car, this has to do with faulty wire harness issues. The correct signal will not reach the ECU, you will have to put the car in park and manually (with a key) start the car. As part of a recall the airbargs in the front did not function well and could cause injury to the passangers, check if this recall has been done on the car you want to purchase.

For the diesels there seem to be more problems with the automatic gearbox, this is due to wire harness cables being damaged by the hot exhaust, this might cause the automatic to shift to neutral. Either fix the wire harness or reroute it completely.

Reports of oil leakes of the turbochargers, oil might leak on hot engine parts and in extreme cases this can cause fires. Make sure the turbochargers are checked for leakages every service interval.

Another recall was done to update the car since there were issues with the safety and emmissions controls.

Overall this S-class is not the most reliable, reliability wise there are better cars in its class. But the S-class from this generation can offer quite a lot of car for you money, it will blow you away with driving comfort, safety features and effortless performance. If you can buy this car, you can probably also have enough cash on hand to do the proper maintenance the car needs, check if there have been recalls on the early models, if you can, go for the cars from the later production years, these will have less problems and have had the latest software loaded. These are very complex vehicles with lots of gadgets, these are potential weak spots over 10-15 years. Right now, this technology will still be reliable. If you drive a lot of long distance and thus drive a lot of miles, in a few years these cars will lose quite some value while you enjoyed the best years of the car. Second hand you will get the best deals.

In 10-15 years real Mercedes Benz fanatics will pick up these cars for 10% of their original purchase price.

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