German Car Zone

I hate to bring this up again because it has been discussed in detail a while ago, and none of us has experienced such a problem.

But today one of my dad's friends told him his 2004 E240 just had a complete brake failure. Fortunately he was not driving fast and he was able to roll to a stop. He said the warning lights came up suddenly and he lost all braking pressure, he was practically standing on the brakes but there wasn't any braking pressure at all. He sent the car in for repair, the mechanic replaced some 'computer chips' and the car is back to normal. I don't know if the car has undergone all the required recall services, and I don't know the exact repair performed by the mechanic.

The exact same problem has also happened to my dad's other friend's 2003 E320, and my friend's dad's 2002 E320.

From what I have seen and read, there is no hydraulic backup system (Gullwing can correct me if I am wrong), so the brakes become completely unassisted when the electronics goes down, and whatever tiny brake pressure your foot would generate were only applied to the front wheels.

I don't know what to make of this really, our E has been fine, same with ree's and wimmer's car, but then again my father's friend's E240 were going fine for 5 years before this happened.

So what do you guys think?

I think that everyone in Australia drives an E-Class

Jokes apart, I think that it was a big fault by Mercedes to rely the car's braking system purely on electronics. Brakes is the most important part of the car when it comes to safety and since you can't rely on electronics 100% there is always room for electric problems.

Oh I forgot to mention, both of my dad's friends are in Hong Kong, my friend's dad is in Australia.

I'm pretty sure there is supposed to be some mechanical backup system for the brakes...Or maybe that is U.S. only?

When the SBC pump goes out there is a hydraulic backup (manual braking to the front wheels only) you need to stand on the pedal with everything you have to get it to work. If you can think straight hit the parking brake also and downshift.

I know in the US the warranty on the pump unit is now 10 year 100K miles? Not sure in your area of the world. You can probably expect to replace the several thousand dollar unit every 8-10 years.

There are several recalls on the unit, mainly coding.

This is scary. I think as W211's get older, we (hopefully not) might start seeing more problems with SBC.

There's a Website I've looked at that shows totaled cars, A LOT of the W211's have a big red "Stop, Braking Malfunction!" Or whatever it says in the speedo digital display.

Really freaky stuff.

...and the manufacturers will always say this cannot happen. Should it happen anyway, the customer is told that he or she is lying.

So you just photograph the failure message on the car's screen, you show it to the dealer, and you threaten to sue them if they don't fix your problem. Same case with me and Volvo, when I had an anti-spin failure, more than 10 times on a row.

Though, the worst part of the problem is, that when the SBC system fails, you can only brake based on your foot strenght, and you can only brake the front wheels, or use the handbrake. So, it can get pretty dangerous...

I've always read that there was a mechanical backup that requred A lot of pressure to work.

Our E had several SBC failure messages come up, but not once did we actually lose braking ability.