I jump-started it and went to a quick-fix service station for a fresh battery. After a few tries, errors, and words that I couldn't publish, I finally got it, and the car moved. You need to take out the rubber piece from the bottom of the cup holder located behind the gear selector, reach out with a special tool through a hole that you can hardly see a button that is located underneath the plastic trim of the center console (and there's no way to see it). Mercedes-Benz was so sure that customers won't have any troubles with their transmissions that they didn't bother to find an easier way to do that. Fortunately, I had the special, Z-shaped tool needed to release the gear lever and put the gearbox into Neutral. But then I needed to use the shift-lock trick to release it from Parking mode. Still, the parking brake was foot operated, and I could release it. So, the only solution was to switch it from P to N, push it, and get the engine running. To add insult to injury, it was parked in such a position that I couldn't jump-start it without 30-ft-long leads, which I didn't have. I could've eaten a Big Mac between the first and second gears.īut once I found myself, and my car, stranded about fifty miles away from home with a dead battery. But, God, that was slower than slow! I tried to put it into manual mode a couple of times. It is reckoned as one of the most reliable automatic transmissions that came from the three-pointed star brand. The first car I owned with an automatic was a Mercedes-Benz C-Class (W203) with a 5G-Tronic tranny. But as the city traffic started to look more like a giant parking lot, I started to reconsider the automatics.Īt that time, I had already driven over a hundred cars with automatics since I was already an automotive journalist. And when the clutch disc was finally completely gone, that skill saved me. The first car I owned had a four-on-the-floor, and I learned how to shift gears even without touching the clutch pedal, and I absolutely loved to do that since most of my friends couldn't. I never considered buying a car with an automatic, but slow traffic and better gearboxes made me reconsider that option. Furthermore, since these gearboxes had become more efficient than manual ones, even the most hard-core fans of the stick shifters had a change of heart. People who live in big, crowded cities crave automatic transmissions.
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