Originally Posted By: aquariuscsm
My friend had I think a C250 for awhile. She dumped an ungodly amount of money into it on repairs regularly. It was only maybe 5 years old and left her stranded every other day it seemed. She called me one night in tears because it left her stranded on I45. That's all it took,she had it hauled off to a junkyard and bought an Infinity Q60 Coupe. Funny thing is,she'd traded her Infinity G37 Coupe in on that Mercedes,and went back to an Infinity!! She said getting rid go the G37 was the biggest mistake she ever made. It never broke down one single time.
The C class was known to be worse than the E class. Also early 2000 models when they were part of Chrysler were bad too, they got a little better afterwards, but it took a while.
As for the variable intake, I didn't know that was also on the diesel. That's somewhat common on the M272 gasoline engine which was from 2006-2011. The intake gets gummed up and a piece breaks off or the rods break. You can get a new unit for around $400, reman is around $300 or you can just buy the parts to fix it for under $100. But you sorta have to take off a lot of electrical, fuel rail, injectors etc., to get at the intake. There's a couple of youtube videos on it, they speed through the whole thing in a half hour, but I'm going to guess it'd probably take 4-5 hours at a garage or longer. Seems to happen anywhere in the 120-160k range.