Damer

Hello Everyone, I bought this car, which is the Laurin & Klement variant on a 67 plate, almost 2 years ago. It replaced my much loved E class Merc which developed a terminal disease. Actually in some respects I like it better: It's considerably quieter, and far less juicy and isn't so wide which makes it better to use in the country lanes around here. I'll digress here to tell you what happened to the Mercedes as it was so strange. The car was on a 60 plate and was bought from a large car supermarket near Willesden, the name of which I can't remember. It had done about 60,000 miles and seemed very good. It was a 2 litre turbodiesel with most of the bells and whistles available, called an Avantgarde. The first problem I had with it related to the automatic transmission. It wouldn't accelerate properly and picked up speed by repeatedly lurching. After a lot of nonsense with the car warranty people , who may have been recommended by Honest John but were very difficult to deal with. They very nearly made me lose my temper. Anyway, they finally authorised me to take the car to a Mercedes main dealer who eventually worked out that it was a software problem and fixed it. I might add that the man I was dealing with at Warranty Direct claimed to be an engineer but was clearly an idiot and an unhelpful one at that. Fast forward a couple of years and the car started to overheat on a sunny summer's day in Central France, on an Autoroute. It became worse and worse, necessitating lots of stops to top up the coolant. Eventually, shortly after arriving in the UK, the hoses blew and I limped to my usual garage. They pressure tested the heat exchanger and found it was faulty so they replaced it but the engine continued to overheat by 10 degrees. Then they thought it must be the head gasket and disembowelled the engine accordingly, at vast expense, only to find it was perfect! They rang their engine specialist who said it wasn't worth pressure testing the cylinder head as in 99% of cases they aren't at fault and opined that it was an engine problem. I was not keen to pay for a heart transplant and asked the garage's advice. Trade it in, they said, and do it quickly. I was annoyed, as anyone would be. I shall think twice before I ever buy another Mercedes as I think they are vastly overrated - underwhelmed doesn't quite cover it! Hence I bought the Superb at a main dealer in Chichester. It was an ex demonstrator and I got it for what I thought was a good price. It was 5 months old, had done 8,500 miles and was £21,500. It has been more or less trouble free though the radar thingy at the front went wrong last year so that you couldn't use the ACC. Caffyns who are the Skoda dealership in Ashford, Kent tried to tell me it was my fault for bumping the car which I had not done. I told the man that I had done no such thing whereupon he uttered some other utter drivel but eventually backed down and agreed to fix the car under its warranty. I shall never darken the doors of that dealership again and told the service advisor or salesman or whatever he was that in no uncertain terms. I afterwards found out that the problem is common in VW Audi group cars which he must have known. I really do think people like that should be humanely destroyed, or perhaps that's too kind! Now the car has another problem: When I was in southern France last summer it was very hot - about 40 degrees. One morning when I started the car, nonsense came up on the screen. First a virtual keypad with instructions to key in a code. Later the whole screen went dim and a message appeared to the effect that it had gone into a mode designed to limit any further damage. I turned the car off, left it for a couple of hours and then started it again to find that the infotainment system worked normally, which was a relief as I needed the satnav to find my way through a part of the country which I don't know very well. Several times since, that virtual keypad has appeared quite randomly. It doesn't seem to relate to weather conditions or anything else. Now the current problem: The car was left parked at Stansted for a week, last month. It was a very wet week and that may have something to do with the trouble. The infotainment system frequently malfunctions. The screen in the dashboard tells me the parking brake is faulty or that the parking sensor doesn't work etc. etc. It's really infuriating. The car has settled down a bit in the last week but is still periodically playing up. Has anyone any experience of this kind of problem? Is it the weather? It does seem likely but cars ought to work in all atmospheric conditions. The car is still under warranty but I haven't much time to take it to a dealer and know from past experience that garages find intermittent faults hard to diagnose. Any advice? My best wishes to you all, Damer