How warm should your car get?

[Halcyon Days]

Not the engine temp, the car it's self?
My CLK, after a run, will be very warm.. The front off-side wing (near the headlight) is almost to hot to touch.
The car runs fine and it's always done this, and in the winter it's very handy as the car will heat the house when it's in the garage :bannana:
But I guess this is normal behaviour?

 

[A1EK]

err not sure... i've never heard of the car being too hot to touch on the body work !! seems not quite right to me.

 

[jotter22]

Unless you have very sensitive hands i would get it looked at does not sound right to me.

Tony.

 

[Halcyon Days]

What is in that general vicinity? From the headlight's back? There doesn't seem to be anything that would get warm? (That I can tell...)
I do have lovely soft, delicate hands though, that's true!! :-D

 

[demetrios]

My r129 500 sl was doing this too. Running at hot temp in the 100 °c on motorway runs and even when it wasn't on motorway it would be too hot too touch on right side just behind headlights which is where the coolant reservoir is.
Turns out it had 2 cracks in my rad!

 

[Halcyon Days]

It's not leaking and the temperature gauge is normal though -
But I'll give the radiator etc a good going over tonight, thanks for the head's up!

 

[rorf]

Both my cars do the same after driving and then stopped for awhile, both mudguards just behind the headlights get pretty hot - being V6s this would be heat from the exhaust manifolds. Some of the guys in the USA leave their bonnets (SLs) open after driving, bit **** in my opinion.

 

[Halcyon Days]

That's it Rorf - it's after you've been driving - I checked it again last night. Immediately after stopping, the bonnet was cool. Five minutes later, very warm.
I imagine (hope!) that Mercedes would have done the standard heat-soak test to make sure this behaviour was ok..

 

[Dieselman]

That's it Rorf - it's after you've been driving - I checked it again last night. Immediately after stopping, the bonnet was cool. Five minutes later, very warm.
I imagine (hope!) that Mercedes would have done the standard heat-soak test to make sure this behaviour was ok..

My suspicion is that if the steel can't stand 100c temperatures, it's not really steel.

 

[ricardo62]

My suspicion is that if the steel can't stand 100c temperatures, it's not really steel.

very wise words indeed