I knew when I bought my Mercedes, that I was buying into a culture as much as getting a nice new luxury car.  That was reinforced for me when I got an invitation from the Mercedes-Benz Owners Club to come to a new members reception last week. 

Most of the folks there were actually long time members, but I was surprised at how many came, and I had a nice time geeking away all afternoon with other completely smitten Mercedes owners, and sampling the tasty h’orderves.  The reception was held at a Mercedes dealership in Bethesda, that turned out to be much, Much larger on the inside then it seemed on the outside, in part because its service area was under the showroom and it was friggin’ huge.  The showroom was full of Mercedes, new and used (er…Previously Owned…), and I took advantage of the opportunity to slide into a few S class beauties and dream.

The dealership gave us a tour of their facilities, and I have never in my life seen mechanic’s stations so spotlessly clean, well organized, and so Spacious.  Each service bay had tons of room around it for the technicians to go about their work, and everything, their tool cases, their work benches, their computer terminals, all the hoses and electrical cabling, was laid out in an uncluttered arrangement that seemed to make everything easy to get at and work with.  I was told that the factory pretty much required that kind of thing from all their dealers, even down to specifying how the floors had to be tiled and kept clean.  That was no concrete floor in there…it was all ceramic tile.  Huge, and I mean Huge, air ducts changed the air out in the entire service area once every fifteen or twenty minutes and kept the place cool in the sweltering Washington summers.  Our tour guide, the head of the service department, said the dealership spent around thirty grand a month in the summer on the A/C bill alone.  He explained how Mercedes keeps track of all the work done on each car in a system that any technician in any Mercedes dealership can access directly from their service bay, and that each technician is sent for training and recertification annually.  

I’d already firmly decided well before then that no mechanic was so much as touching my car unless they were a trained and factory authorized Mercedes-Benz technician. I’ve never felt that way about a car before, but as I said, you buy one of these you’re buying into a culture too, and in any case they’re just different enough from the run-of-the-mill average everyday automobile that it made sense to me to just bear the extra cost of letting only Mercedes dealers work on it.  Things I’ve read since I bought the car, of how if even body work isn’t done by someone who knows those cars, it can degrade or outright disable the car’s safety features, only reinforced that mindset.  The effect of seeing that amazingly well laid out service area last week pretty much cinched it.  But I had to figure that service on these cars is probably a tad pricey. 

My car came with a little maintenance history booklet that the service folks are supposed to fill out and stamp and sign for each page of each scheduled servicing, and then tear out a little stub on the end of the page.  I had my first free thousand mile checkup a few weeks ago, and in theory wasn’t scheduled for any more servicing until 6 and a half grand, when I get a free tire rotation.  I get what Mercedes calls Services 1/A and 3 at 13 grand.  I assume that includes an oil change.  And there’s where I part company with Mercedes.

Traveler has synthetic oil in its engine, which is supposed to last for thousands more miles then regular.  But I have always changed my oil every 3 grand and I don’t see any reason to stop doing that now.  I got about 135k miles on my first car, a 1973 Ford Pinto for gosh sake, in part I’m certain by changing the oil every 3 thousand miles no matter what.  In the end you could pop off that motor’s valve cover and the inside looked factory new (unfortunately the rest of the car was falling apart but…oh well…).  When I go on my cross country trips I stop, religiously for an oil change wherever I happen to be, when that 3 thousand mile clock ticks over.  As far as I’m concerned, synthetic oil means I have a bigger safety buffer, but I don’t want to test it.  Oil changes are cheaper then new engines, even at synthetic prices, and this car was too expensive for me to not take fastidious care of it.  So I called my dealer, Valley Motors, and scheduled an oil change.  I had to figure I wasn’t going to be charged Jiffy Lube prices.

The lady I spoke with asked me if I had a service agent assigned to me.  I hadn’t known I was supposed to get one of those at my first thousand mile servicing.  She assigned one to me, and it was scheduled for this morning.

You pull right up into a long indoor service check-in bay and walk up to the counter where your servicing agent is waiting for you.  You get checked in and you hand off your key and the agent goes out to the car and collects it’s vitals (milage, plate number, vin and so forth) and then prints out a service order for you to sign.  Then if it’s waitable you go rest in a nicely appointed lounge where you can eat the free pastries, make some coffee or tea or grab a free soda.  The lounge also just happens to be next to a little Mercedes boutique where you can buy all sorts of Mercedes-Benz goodies…jackets, drink holders, factory approved car cleaners, anti-freeze, washer fluid, wallets, hats, wrist watches…

It took about a half hour and they gave the car a thorough washing and cleaning before handing it back to me.  They drive it back into the service check-in bay and call your name and hand you the bill.  It cost about 110 dollars for my oil change…almost but not quite three times the Jiffy Lube price.  But I was feeling secure that the only hands that touched my car during the procedure were those that know these cars specifically, and in detail, and that whatever they put into it was something that was specifically supposed to be there.  I figured most of the bill was labor.  But to my surprise the labor was only twenty bucks.  Parts came to almost 84 bucks and the rest was tax.  And most of the parts cost was the oil, which I knew wasn’t cheap being it was that synthetic stuff.  Nine quarts at almost seven bucks a quart.

I’m sorry…Nine quarts…?  In a V-6…??? 

When I got home I brought in my owners manuals and looked it up.  That engine holds 8 and a half U.S. quarts of oil!   A Ford Explorer V-8 only holds 6…I just Googled it.

Damn.  Damn!  They’re not fucking around are they?  The engineers figure almost nine quarts is what their V-6 should have on hand while it’s running, that’s what it gets, and never mind what the bean counters say.

Something else I learned while Googling this: the oil drain is on the Side of Mercedes engines, not the bottom, so if it ever comes out while you’re driving, all the oil won’t drain out of the engine.  Mercedes technicians use a vacuum to remove the oil from the engine during an oil change.  Another reason not to go to Jiffy Lube.

Okay…I’m a geek.  But this is why I always wanted one of these cars…

[Update…]   While Googling around and reading more about the synthetic oil recommended by Mercedes (which is the Mobil 1 type of Group IV synthetics), I’ve found that the consensus is you should still change the oil at the same intervals you otherwise would if you were using plain old regular oil.  The modern synthetics give you better protection at the low and high temperature ranges, which is why some high performance engines require it, but normal wear contaminants will still build up in a synthetic just as they would in regular oil, and the only way to deal with that is to change it. 

So it seems to be pretty much as I’d figured: the synthetic oil in my engine gives me a bigger safety zone, but the best thing is to keep changing it at the intervals I normally would anyway…around every three-thousand miles, though one guy said with advances in modern engines the air cleaners,  compression and oil-control rings and positive crankcase ventilation systems, he’s leaning toward five-thousand miles between changes.  But I’m going to stick to 3k.