How Variable is a Variable Servicing interval

[Soltan]

I've just spent several hours at Mercedes Birmingham trying to work out why my car thinks it needs a service after only 9000 odd miles. Given that I drive a E320 CDI and allot of my mileage is motorway (about 300 miles per week, aprox 190m of which is motorway, 75m dual carriageway (40-50mph), and the rest local) this seemed very low to me.

In addition, although everyone including the garage agrees my car does not have fixed service intervals it is counting down as if it was fixed, i.e. if I drive 650 miles it knocks off 650 miles from the service interval, regardless of how I drove during that time.)

Has anyone come across this before? If you have variable servicing intervals on your car, do you actually see any difference to the interval when you are driving, over the course of a day, a week or a month?

MB Birmingham have agreed to raise this as a concern with MB on Tuesday. Hopefully I will get a call soon after that.

As some of you have mentioned before the car needs to be set to the right type of oil. They assure me they are using Mobile 1 fully synthetic, but they say there is no way to check what the car was set to when it was last serviced.
I thought there was from the servicing menu on the dash, but could not find it (although I thought I had checked it before).
In addition they reset the service interval and then tried to unset it (which they assure me is an option) but it wouldn't let them (the STAR machine said it couldn't be done apparently, when they tried). So now my car reads around 9300 miles to the next service!

Any advise, thoughts etc. welcome.

 

[Marque]

Check this thread: http://www.mbclub.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=49968

 

[Soltan]

Spot on, the symptoms are exactly the same. aprox 10K to the next service and a straight line countdown.
So is there a way of telling the car it has the correct oil without servicing it or resetting the service indicator?

 

[Rory]

The most simple and practical solution would be to now leave your car until you feel it needs servicing - perhaps at something like 15K miles, or even go the full 18K miles, depending on time and your type of use.

Then when it next says it needs servicing, have the garage reset it again.

Certainly the system works perfectly on my W203, but yours is a common complaint on W211. I do lowish mileage and my car just ran right through to 2yrs before calling for a service. The dealer offered to change me to fixed interval, 15,500/1yr service intervals but turns out ServicePlus won't support that. However other posters have reported that their dealers say the cars can't be changed to fixed interval.

 

[Soltan]

The most simple and practical solution would be to now leave your car until you feel it needs servicing - perhaps at something like 15K miles, or even go the full 18K miles, depending on time and your type of use.

Then when it next says it needs servicing, have the garage reset it again.

That is true, and thanks for pointing that out Rory, I have a tendency to get a little too involved when presented with a problem. If they cannot reset the service interval to what it should be then I will do that.