Petrol Warning Fail.

[Dieselman]

I feel drained after reading this!

Surely, you mean "empty".

 

[rjmghome]

I should point out that the first quote in my post ("You are going to run out of fuel you fool...", etc) is lifted from the OP's blog entry; his words, not mine.

Merci bien.

I should point out that I'd agree with your point IFF (i.e. If and only if) the goddamned warning light had actually come on, which it didn't, so I got no warning, patronising or otherwise, of my imminent immobility, which was the point I was making in the first place.

To summarise:
The car ran out of petrol. Clearly it doesn't fill itself, so that is my fault. I am old enough to use petrol pumps, (but probably not diesel) so we can discard that theory.

I currently also own a Ferrari 355, (and have had 2 Astons, 3 Ferraris, 2 Porches, inter alia) cars not known for their abstemious nature and, despite only having an Italian fuel gauge (Hello B&Q), a device about as accurate as Mark Thatcher's sense of direction, the 355 has never led me to be standing at the road side wondering how the hell that happened (except when I span it, but that's irrelevant for these purposes)

Only a Mercedes C63 AMG PPP with thousands of pounds of technology, most of it extraneous and pointless, has achieved this.

However, I do recognise that this is a Mercedes Forum and therefore will, on average, tend to attract fans of the cars.

I too love the engine and car, it's the rest of the stuff that gets on my nerves.

and calm....

 

[MOCAŠ]

Merci bien.

I should point out that I'd agree with your point IFF (i.e. If and only if) the goddamned warning light had actually come on, which it didn't, so I got no warning, patronising or otherwise, of my imminent immobility, which was the point I was making in the first place.

To summarise:
The car ran out of petrol. Clearly it doesn't fill itself, so that is my fault. I am old enough to use petrol pumps, (but probably not diesel) so we can discard that theory.

I currently also own a Ferrari 355, (and have had 2 Astons, 3 Ferraris, 2 Porches, inter alia) cars not known for their abstemious nature and, despite only having an Italian fuel gauge (Hello B&Q), a device about as accurate as Mark Thatcher's sense of direction, the 355 has never led me to be standing at the road side wondering how the hell that happened (except when I span it, but that's irrelevant for these purposes)

Only a Mercedes C63 AMG PPP with thousands of pounds of technology, most of it extraneous and pointless, has achieved this.

However, I do recognise that this is a Mercedes Forum and therefore will, on average, tend to attract fans of the cars.

I too love the engine and car, it's the rest of the stuff that gets on my nerves.

and calm....

Erm, did you not notice the proximity of fuel gauge needle to the empty position?

If you seriously received no warning whatsoever that you were within the reserve tank capacity (and I appreciate that that's what you're saying) then that's a fault, not a characteristic. I'm pretty sure that this is not something you can switch off via the configuration menus.

 

[Auto-mobile]

Moral of the story is don't drive a 6.2 litre v8 petrol with next to no fuel in the tank and wonder why you run out.

 

[rjmghome]

Moral of the story is don't drive a 6.2 litre v8 petrol with next to no fuel in the tank and wonder why you run out.

Or, an alternative moral that also fits the data, is;

Don't rely on all the technology that's supposed to make your £72k car a pleasant experience, use the old fashioned method and save several thousand pounds and get a more enjoyable vehicle (even if you can't de-specify a dodgy fuel warning light) .

(Free consumer advice)

 

[jotter22]

Or, an alternative moral that also fits the data, is;

Don't rely on all the technology that's supposed to make your £72k car a pleasant experience, use the old fashioned method and save several thousand pounds and get a more enjoyable vehicle (even if you can't de-specify a dodgy fuel warning light) .

(Free consumer advice)

Oh come on if you have run out of fuel regardless of warnings you have to take that on the chin!
As per post #22 sorry

Tony.

 

[bolide]

To the OP:

This is the most pointless, irritating thread I have read on MB Club to date

Congratulations! You're going to fit right in!

 

[h19sns]

I had a budgie once, just got it used to living without food and it died! Very similar!! ;-)

 

[aquanaut]

Cant see how you would not notice the fuel guage and mileage. Usual around town driving gives u 185 to 205 miles to a tank. Max i had was a long distance drive at 286 miles. Had all the alerts, no range etc so drove to petrol station fully expecting to not make it, filled up...57 ltrs so still had 9 litres left. Your fuel guage must have been on zero!

 

[DSM10000]

why does fuel gauge link to B&Q? Am I missing something??

You certainly appear to be missing something!

 

[rjmghome]

I had a budgie once, just got it used to living without food and it died! Very similar!! ;-)

Maybe you missed the warning signs that budgies, unlike my car, give. Full story for all those who keep pointing out the bleeding obvious.

When I bought the C63 AMG PPP Estate, I was immediately overwhelmed by the amount of spurious information it was conveying to me. It flashed and beeped and vibrated warnings like some kind of health and safety Tourette’s sufferer. Gradually, one by one and with much detective work I have either managed to turn all the nonsense off, or, if that proved too complex, learned to ignore it. I have even got used to the fact that the German’s have designed a system that deliberately and consciously mitigates against those of us who can multitask and have a penis.


When the car warns you that you have back seats, or some other blindingly obvious feature, you can tell it to shut up by pressing the “OK” button (thanks to the chap on the Mercedes forum for telling me this, the manual didn’t mention it particularly prominently). The “OK” button is on the left of the steering wheel. The seat belt buckle device is also on the left of the seat. So, after I reverse out of my drive (without seat belt on), I engage drive, get patronised by the car telling me about the back seats and then have to decide whether to carry on putting on the belt or, stop putting on the seat belt to press “OK”. If I don’t press “OK” I can’t see the digital speedometer to make sure I don’t go over 20mph. Where I live the council has created a new camera infested traffic calming system. Do I carry on putting on the seat belt and risk getting photographed at over 20 mph, but at least with my seat belt on, or drop the belt, press “OK” and drive off without the belt and get a different photo in the post from the Thought Police?

In Germany, where they drive on the wrong side and so put on their belts with the right hand, it might work. But here it is just bad design, poorly thought through.

Well, as I said, I was getting used to all this nonsense by a combination of waging war on it and developing a thicker skin, until yesterday. Yesterday the car failed to warn me of the only thing that a car has reasonably been expected to warn you about since almost the beginning of motoring. Cars have fuel gauges. Fuel gauges are traditionally conservative so you can have an early warning that your steed is thirsty and the bucket is nearly empty. The C63 AMG is a mighty steed and has a correspondingly mighty thirst. It does, on average, 16 mpg, or so it tells me.

Mercedes of course have complicated the old simple system. They have added fuel saving strategies and a gradation of warnings, starting with a little light

“Coo-ey. You might want to get some fuel”​

going through the Germanic engineering warning

“You are using the reserves that I prudently put aside for just this type of eventuality, I have made some fuel saving adjustments to compensate for your recklessness, now, get some fuel” ​

and ending with the frankly manic

“You are going to run out of fuel you fool, stop! Stop everything! Do you even know what a petrol pump looks like? Find one, fast, but in the name of God not too fast and don’t, whatever you do, turn on the air-conditioning”​

Lies, Damned Lies and Warning Lights on a Mercedes
This latter light you cannot easily get rid of by pressing “OK”. It is serious this time and can’t be easily told to stuff off.

Broadly speaking, I interpret these warning as:

Light : 25-30 miles;

Reserve fuel light: 10-15 miles

Mad panic: 5-10 miles.

These are of course just wild guesses.

You can use the trip computer to make wild guesses on your behalf if you want to. On one occasion I turned the car on and it said I had 21 miles of fuel. I sedately drove through the 20mph zone and it reappraised the situation. Now I had 16 miles of fuel. Once on the unrestricted carriageway, about 150 metres further into my journey, it took another guess; This time at 22 miles. So a C63 AMG goes further when it travels faster and, even more intriguingly, it goes further still if it is accelerated than if it is allowed to idle along. I have used this random number generator to prove to my daughter that computers are not always right, which is a useful lesson; albeit not one I was expecting to be given by a German executive estate car.

Anyway, you can see that the waves of pointless and inaccurate information the car has fed me about all manner of things have led me to conclude that I’ll wait for the panic and then fill it.

Yesterday I drove to the Post Office to pick up a package that had failed to be delivered by our now profitable Royal Mail Service. The total distance to the sorting office is, according to Google maps, between 2.7 and 3.1 miles of 30 mph, or less, roads.

When I started the car, it showed the reserve light. I pressed “OK”. It beeped to tell me I was in my garage and it had noticed that the garage had walls. I ignored it and selected reverse. It beeped furiously when it noticed that the door of the garage was narrow. I already knew this so I ignored all the flashing lights and beeps. I pulled onto the road and selected Drive. It told me I had back seats and that some of them had the seat belt undone, which was fine because they were all empty. I decided to pull way whilst putting on my seat belt rather than hold up the traffic whilst I pressed “OK” then put on my belt. And off we went, at a sedate 20mph.

There were no further warnings to report. I picked up my book from those nice people at Amazon who always deliver when you at work and set off on my 2.7 mile journey home. 1.7 miles in the car coughed, gasped, wheezed and stopped. It had just enough momentum for me to pull off the main road and roll to a halt half blocking an access road to a shopping area. The car showed all the signs of having run out petrol, except the one sign that I was expecting it to make. The car had singly failed to give me the:

“You are going to run out of fuel you fool, stop! Stop everything! Do you even know what a petrol pump looks like? Find one, fast, but in the name of God not too fast and don’t, whatever you do, turn on the air-conditioning”

Signal.

I was sitting in air conditioned luxury. The temperature was lower than outside, but so too was the velocity. The dog had simply failed to bark. The system had not worked. It had let me down and left me sitting in two tonnes of German road block. I put on the hazards, got out, mouthed my apologies to the people who were now trying to work their way around my stationery car. Pure good fortune meant that I had broken down outside a restaurant run by one of the nicest men in St Albans. I wrote a review of http://www.barmeze.co.uk/ long before yesterday’s incident on:


http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g186306-d698114-r127401938-Bar_Meze-St_Albans_Hertfordshire_England.html


Again purely fortuitously, he was being dropped off by his wife for work.

I called out for help and courtesy of Freddie, the owner, I got a push to get the car out of the way and clear the road. I also got a free cup of coffee and had a chat about my daughter’s exams, the situation in Egypt, (Freddie/Farouk’s birthplace) and booked dinner whilst I waited for my other half to trudge a mile up the hill with a can of petrol. The petrol revived the car instantly, but still no warning light of impending doom came on as we crawled to the petrol station and put another £90.00 in the thirsty little *******.

That evening we had dinner at Bar Mezze and at the end we played the bill guessing game. This is our way of assessing the value of any restaurant. Taking into account everything you know about the food, drink and general price point that you feel you are dealing with, guess how much you think the bill will be (before service). If your guess is higher than the actual cost, it’s good value. If your guess is less than they are charging you, it is bad value. We have been to Freddie’s many times, although not for a little while, so we should be pretty good at getting it close to being right. However, we both guessed that the bill should be about 10-15% more than it actually was. So, an objective measure that says it was good value. Nice people, who help you without hesitation and then sell you what you want for less than you’d expected to pay, isn’t that what makes customers happy? We left a hefty tip that Freddie tried to refuse, before I insisted.

When I got home I decided to list all my cars over the years and rank them out of ten. The C63 AMG is a long way from my favourite. A brilliant engine is totally ruined by smart **** electronics that don’t even work properly. Time to think about what the next car will be.

 

[Deleted member 6183]

Prozac might help.

 

[DITTRICH]

I get the impression that you could have pushed the car to the nearest fuel station in the time it took to write post #31. Life is too short. Drive or push on please!

 

[George Douglas]

i have started to use this thread as a bedtime story for the grandchlren , it works wonders

 

[Mr. B]

maybe you missed the warning signs that budgies, unlike my car, give. Full story for all those who keep pointing out the bleeding obvious.

when i bought the c63 amg ppp estate, i was immediately overwhelmed by the amount of spurious information it was conveying to me. It flashed and beeped and vibrated warnings like some kind of health and safety tourette’s sufferer. Gradually, one by one and with much detective work i have either managed to turn all the nonsense off, or, if that proved too complex, learned to ignore it. I have even got used to the fact that the german’s have designed a system that deliberately and consciously mitigates against those of us who can multitask and have a penis.


when the car warns you that you have back seats, or some other blindingly obvious feature, you can tell it to shut up by pressing the “ok” button (thanks to the chap on the mercedes forum for telling me this, the manual didn’t mention it particularly prominently). The “ok” button is on the left of the steering wheel. The seat belt buckle device is also on the left of the seat. So, after i reverse out of my drive (without seat belt on), i engage drive, get patronised by the car telling me about the back seats and then have to decide whether to carry on putting on the belt or, stop putting on the seat belt to press “ok”. If i don’t press “ok” i can’t see the digital speedometer to make sure i don’t go over 20mph. Where i live the council has created a new camera infested traffic calming system. Do i carry on putting on the seat belt and risk getting photographed at over 20 mph, but at least with my seat belt on, or drop the belt, press “ok” and drive off without the belt and get a different photo in the post from the thought police?

in germany, where they drive on the wrong side and so put on their belts with the right hand, it might work. But here it is just bad design, poorly thought through.

well, as i said, i was getting used to all this nonsense by a combination of waging war on it and developing a thicker skin, until yesterday. Yesterday the car failed to warn me of the only thing that a car has reasonably been expected to warn you about since almost the beginning of motoring. Cars have fuel gauges. Fuel gauges are traditionally conservative so you can have an early warning that your steed is thirsty and the bucket is nearly empty. The c63 amg is a mighty steed and has a correspondingly mighty thirst. It does, on average, 16 mpg, or so it tells me.

mercedes of course have complicated the old simple system. They have added fuel saving strategies and a gradation of warnings, starting with a little light

“coo-ey. You might want to get some fuel”​

going through the germanic engineering warning

“you are using the reserves that i prudently put aside for just this type of eventuality, i have made some fuel saving adjustments to compensate for your recklessness, now, get some fuel” ​

and ending with the frankly manic

“you are going to run out of fuel you fool, stop! Stop everything! Do you even know what a petrol pump looks like? Find one, fast, but in the name of god not too fast and don’t, whatever you do, turn on the air-conditioning”​

lies, damned lies and warning lights on a mercedes
this latter light you cannot easily get rid of by pressing “ok”. It is serious this time and can’t be easily told to stuff off.

broadly speaking, i interpret these warning as:

light : 25-30 miles;

reserve fuel light: 10-15 miles

mad panic: 5-10 miles.

these are of course just wild guesses.

you can use the trip computer to make wild guesses on your behalf if you want to. On one occasion i turned the car on and it said i had 21 miles of fuel. I sedately drove through the 20mph zone and it reappraised the situation. Now i had 16 miles of fuel. Once on the unrestricted carriageway, about 150 metres further into my journey, it took another guess; this time at 22 miles. So a c63 amg goes further when it travels faster and, even more intriguingly, it goes further still if it is accelerated than if it is allowed to idle along. I have used this random number generator to prove to my daughter that computers are not always right, which is a useful lesson; albeit not one i was expecting to be given by a german executive estate car.

anyway, you can see that the waves of pointless and inaccurate information the car has fed me about all manner of things have led me to conclude that i’ll wait for the panic and then fill it.

yesterday i drove to the post office to pick up a package that had failed to be delivered by our now profitable royal mail service. The total distance to the sorting office is, according to google maps, between 2.7 and 3.1 miles of 30 mph, or less, roads.

when i started the car, it showed the reserve light. I pressed “ok”. It beeped to tell me i was in my garage and it had noticed that the garage had walls. I ignored it and selected reverse. It beeped furiously when it noticed that the door of the garage was narrow. I already knew this so i ignored all the flashing lights and beeps. I pulled onto the road and selected drive. It told me i had back seats and that some of them had the seat belt undone, which was fine because they were all empty. I decided to pull way whilst putting on my seat belt rather than hold up the traffic whilst i pressed “ok” then put on my belt. And off we went, at a sedate 20mph.

there were no further warnings to report. I picked up my book from those nice people at amazon who always deliver when you at work and set off on my 2.7 mile journey home. 1.7 miles in the car coughed, gasped, wheezed and stopped. It had just enough momentum for me to pull off the main road and roll to a halt half blocking an access road to a shopping area. The car showed all the signs of having run out petrol, except the one sign that i was expecting it to make. The car had singly failed to give me the:

“you are going to run out of fuel you fool, stop! Stop everything! Do you even know what a petrol pump looks like? Find one, fast, but in the name of god not too fast and don’t, whatever you do, turn on the air-conditioning”

signal.

i was sitting in air conditioned luxury. The temperature was lower than outside, but so too was the velocity. The dog had simply failed to bark. The system had not worked. It had let me down and left me sitting in two tonnes of german road block. I put on the hazards, got out, mouthed my apologies to the people who were now trying to work their way around my stationery car. Pure good fortune meant that i had broken down outside a restaurant run by one of the nicest men in st albans. I wrote a review of http://www.barmeze.co.uk/ long before yesterday’s incident on:


http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/showuserreviews-g186306-d698114-r127401938-bar_meze-st_albans_hertfordshire_england.html


again purely fortuitously, he was being dropped off by his wife for work.

i called out for help and courtesy of freddie, the owner, i got a push to get the car out of the way and clear the road. i also got a free cup of coffee and had a chat about my daughter’s exams, the situation in egypt, (freddie/farouk’s birthplace) and booked dinner whilst i waited for my other half to trudge a mile up the hill with a can of petrol. The petrol revived the car instantly, but still no warning light of impending doom came on as we crawled to the petrol station and put another £90.00 in the thirsty little *******.

that evening we had dinner at bar mezze and at the end we played the bill guessing game. This is our way of assessing the value of any restaurant. Taking into account everything you know about the food, drink and general price point that you feel you are dealing with, guess how much you think the bill will be (before service). If your guess is higher than the actual cost, it’s good value. If your guess is less than they are charging you, it is bad value. We have been to freddie’s many times, although not for a little while, so we should be pretty good at getting it close to being right. However, we both guessed that the bill should be about 10-15% more than it actually was. So, an objective measure that says it was good value. Nice people, who help you without hesitation and then sell you what you want for less than you’d expected to pay, isn’t that what makes customers happy? We left a hefty tip that freddie tried to refuse, before i insisted.

when i got home i decided to list all my cars over the years and rank them out of ten. The c63 amg is a long way from my favourite. A brilliant engine is totally ruined by smart **** electronics that don’t even work properly. Time to think about what the next car will be.

 

[rjmghome]

I get the impression that you could have pushed the car to the nearest fuel station in the time it took to write post #31. Life is too short. Drive or push on please!

Except I cut and pasted it from where the original lives, so the opportunity cost was minimal.

My original question was "Has anyone else had a fuel warning light failure?"

The answer to which from m'learned friends has been:

Good natured, informative, discursive, insulting, bemused, more insults, helpful, amusing and a bit testy, supportive, bemused again, clarification, bemused, lame, lengthy, relevant and informed, ill-informed, exasperated, weird, budgie based, irrelevant, rude, fulsome, drug related, exasperated again and slightly bemused and, finally, graphic.

Or more briefly: No!

For which I am, on the whole, very grateful.

The efforts of all those who are bored by this are especially appreciated, without people who go the extra mile and share their tedium, their is no discussion for the silent majority.

 

[aquanaut]

well, if the range is not working or fuel gauge is wrong then i would suggest getting your merc on star then to see if any fault codes show. Or are they all working now? As for all the beeps and flashes and vibrations...just curious what part of car vibrates and what is it warning?! Granted the seabelts for the rear is a bit pointless but to moan about the parktronic warning you is bizarre. Perhaps tape a checklist to your car dash...start car, turn off parktronic, reverse, stop, seabelt on, engage drive and head off @ 20mph. once at 185miles on odometer, refuel. sorted.

 

[MOCAŠ]

just curious what part of car vibrates and what is it warning?!

My steering wheel vibrates if I traverse a white line without indicating a lane change. It's part of the Attention Assist package, although it can be turned off, or made to operate in adaptive mode, via the car's set-up menu.

 

[NISFAN]

Welcome to the forum rjmghome

You might get more sympathy if you don't mention the C word, well not a word but the letter followed by the numbers 63.

I honestly think many members on this forum think the C63 is a joint manufacturing venture by Audi and BMW, cleverly disguised as a MB

Never, not had the warning light come on, on my W204, but can easily understand how ridiculous the fuel gauge must be on a C63. The needle is as thick as your finger, the width representing about 1/8 of the tank capacity. Coupled to a car that struggles to manage 200 miles between fills, the light is a very important feature.

By the way, my M6 tells you to the very last mile how many miles range you have, and conveniently reminds you when you have 50, 30, 20, etc miles left, with deadly accuracy.

I would get the light checked out at your local dealer.

 

[MOCAŠ]

By the way, my M6 tells you to the very last mile how many miles range you have, and conveniently reminds you when you have 50, 30, 20, etc miles left, with deadly accuracy.

To be fair, MBs also show how many miles you have left (provided they're working correctly), although I'm not sure about the "deadly accuracy" in either marque (or any other, for that matter), as this will depend on largely on driving style and, to a lesser extent, driving conditions, both of which are difficult for the car's computer to predict.

In my experience, both with my current (R172) and previous (R171) SLKs, the range is only a best-guess indication based on whatever information is available at the time. My previous SLK would show the "range" right down to 1 mile, and then zero miles, although I never really knew how far one mile's worth of fuel would actually stretch, and on one or two occasions while I was seeking out a Shell station, I discovered that an indicated zero would actually get me to a petrol station a couple of miles away. Never did the car actually splutter to a halt.

In the R172, when the range drops to below 20 miles or so it stops trying to guess how far you can get and just displays what will henceforth be referred to in these parts as the PANIC! symbol. However, if you then adjust your driving style, it will switch back to showing the range if it decides you may now be able to eke more than 20 miles out of what you have left.

Incidentally, after I filled up last week my range indicator was optimistically showing 410 miles. By the time I'd sedately driven a couple of miles down the road from the petrol station, it had rather amusingly tumbled to around 382 miles, and by the time I'd arrived home about 12 miles later, it was showing 260. As our American friends might say, go figure.

Given the myriad complexities of accurately determining the true range when fuel is low, I wonder why cars don't provide the option of displaying how much is in the tank (ie: in litres) so that the driver can make his own judgement as to how far it will take him.