Participation in the mileage of the “Car of the Year” meant that I would not see Mercedes for about a week, so having returned to his steering wheel, and it was in the evening of mid-October, I experienced a sense of reunification with an old relative. It was warm enough, and therefore I did not miss the opportunity to lower the SLK roof and go home not in the compartment, but in an elegant relative.
I enjoyed every minute of my journey — imagine, as long as 45 minutes! Here I do not understand why I wanted to raise the roof, and… nothing happened to press the button. No movement in the back, no buzz of electric drives, no flashing malfunctions, no sound signals… Nothing at all! Oh-oh… I turned off the ignition, then I started the car again — and repeated this procedure several times (the entire system is controlled by a computer, suddenly hung). Then I began to delicately press all the buttons, check the wiring and fuses — but nothing could make the roof return to the paramount position.
I called this problem AA — «frozen lava» in the language of seismologists. I, and the whole edition of the magazine, tried to at least manually fold the roof — but everything is to no avail. All that remained was to do is cover the car with an awning until the circumstances of the breakdown. Slk spent the night under the covers.
The next day I asked for the Mercedes technical center. There immediately began the proceedings with my problem. Unfortunately, it was not possible to solve it quickly, and therefore I was given under the power of attorney another SLK, while mine is on the repair. I was terribly lucky — I got SLK an almost exact copy of the original. Yes, yes, the same discs, the same colors of exterior and interior, the same engine… I found only two differences: optional xenon headlights (option, cost ‡ 730) are installed here and there is no sports suspension. Having left on the road with optional optics, I realized how great the advantage of Ksenona over the “halogen” of my car. A bright bunch of light provided excellent lighting of all road bumps — and therefore they could be rounded in time. When it was not possible to do this, a comfortable suspension of 350-. With her, SLK behaves much softer and measured — and this way of driving begins to lull. Thank God, with a sports suspension, sleep does not threaten a dream at the wheel. Softer steering reactions to the steering wheel mean that it is less common, or even not to use the stabilization system at all. So-minus £ 190 from the price list ..
A few days later, the KV08 roof returned to a closed position. What was the cause of the problem? In Mercedes, the malfunction is motivated by entering the fabric mechanism — they say, only one millimeter of the fabric between the moving levers will be enough to close the entire chain. As a result, they had to disassemble the entire roof to extract an unfortunate piece … as for me, the reliability of the system is comparable to the fact that if I touched someone in a pub, I would definitely break my leg to the visitor. Is the system so gentle? But this is not to me to decide-by clicking on the button, I again enjoyed the buzz of servo-drives. No, this is not a buzzing — this is music, a balm to the soul.