I Bought a Repo’d Mercedes Diesel and I Regret it. Here’s Why You Shouldn’t..

Hopefully we're not going to find like bodies or something. Oh no. Good morning. I just bought another vehicle and I'm on my way to go pick it up. Not like I need any more projects right now. Normally I hire a tow truck to pick up my auction purchases. However, seeing as I just put this truck into service, we're going to use this to pick it up. And I've reserved a U-Haul trailer that we're going to go pick up on the way there. I really need to finish building my gooseneck trailer. I got the U-Haul hooked up and it only ended up costing a little over $60. Normally when you purchase from a dealer-only auction, you only have a couple days to pick up your vehicle before they start charging storage fees. You really have to be prepared to pay for the vehicle and arrange for transportation. Here it is, a 2007 Mercedes E320 with a 3 liter V6 diesel engine. Now this vehicle is a repo and it doesn't even come with a key. Cosmetically it seems to be in decent shape, but mechanically it's a huge mystery. With the car loaded and strapped down, let's pick this up later when I get home. Later. Because I don't have a key for this vehicle, not only can I not drive it off the trailer, but the wheels are locked to one side which makes it a lot harder to pull it off the trailer. I decided to use my Range Rover to pull it off and what a kerfuffle it was. Luckily I had a couple helpers and eventually we managed to get the job done. Now if you're a regular viewer on the channel, you know that I love diesel engines. Compared to gasoline engines, they're more simple because they don't have spark ignition systems, they're more reliable, they're more fuel efficient, they have loads of torque, and they usually sound pretty good too. This vehicle should be able to get around 38 miles per gallon on the highway, which gives it a range of over 700 miles on a tank of fuel. The interior is cashmere with burl walnut trim. It's a really nice place to be. This example is fully loaded with the Premium 2 package. That comes with navigation, heated seats, bi-xenon headlamps, and even a sunshade for the rear window. The E320 then is an excellent choice for road trips or even for everyday commuting. At this point I'm waiting for this vehicle's title to arrive to serve as proof of ownership so that I can order a new key and then we can see if this vehicle actually works. Well, the title came in and it shows that the lien holder was Loanmax. That tells me that the previous owner took out a title loan and didn't make the payments on it. Also included in the documentation that I received was an affidavit of repossession which says that he only owed about $1,500 on the loan, which is absolutely crazy to me. Now there are a couple reasons that I can think of of why someone would stop making payments on a loan and I'm not going to go into details on both of them, but one of them is potentially really bad for me and it could be that there's something seriously wrong with this vehicle and that's why he decided to stop making payments. The title came in so I'm on my way to the Mercedes dealer to order a new key and I decided to take the Range Rover. Now if you didn't see the last video of the Range Rover series, I kind of unintentionally left it as a cliffhanger because I was in such a hurry to go on my cross-country road trip that I had to do a lot of prep for. In any case, there was a lot of aluminum in the oil and luckily this thing, all the aluminum has cleared up pretty much. I've done a bunch of oil changes and this vehicle has been great. I've been driving it quite a bit so I'm really happy about that. If you didn't see that video series, you should go check it out. Well, here I am at the Mercedes dealer and there's another Range Rover over there. There it is. $420 for a new key. Check it out. Shiny new key. This thing's pretty sweet. So the first order of business. The battery on this thing is very dead and it's located in the trunk which I have not been able to open because I haven't had a key. So now that I have this mechanical key, I can get the trunk open. One thing that I did notice is that the rear suspension is pretty low so there could be a lot of stuff in the trunk. Hopefully we're not going to find like bodies or something. All right, let's use this mechanical key to see if we can get this trunk open. Insert it. Turn it. There we go. Well, definitely no bodies in here. We have some hardware and it looks... Oh no. Oh no. These are metal parts. So these are pieces of cast aluminum, it looks like, that broke off of something. I'm not sure what. And below it are like the belly pans for the vehicle. So I bet this vehicle bottomed out on something really badly. And something broke, but the question is what broke? I'm worried that that could be the oil pan. So let's check the oil and see if it has oil in it. Oh no, that looks like that's dry. Okay, this is not looking good. I decided it would be best to jack the vehicle up so I can take a look underneath and investigate further. All right, the oil pan here is made of steel, so that's not what broke. It is, however, covered in diesel engine oil. I can tell by how black it is. So I'm still suspecting that the problem is with the engine. Unfortunately, the block, I think, is made of aluminum. So maybe that's what we're dealing with here. All right, so oil pan there, block. That thing over there is the starter. And then underneath the starter... Underneath the starter, you can see that there's a nice new access hole in the block that's admittedly not supposed to be there. And there's a bunch of mangled up metal inside there. So this vehicle needs a new engine. So here's what happened here. The engine threw a rod, which is when the connecting rod breaks or becomes detached at or near the piston. The other end of the connecting rod, of course, is still attached to the crankshaft, which is spinning around very, very quickly. Now, the loose end of the connecting rod will end up falling down into the crank case, into a horizontal position, in this case, I think. And then the crankshaft will then push it through the wall of the cylinder block. Now, I think what we should do is pull the engine from this and disassemble it so we can see exactly what happened here. For educational purposes, of course. This is the kind of content you just don't get on Sam Krak or Hoovy's Garage. I managed to get the vehicle into my makeshift workshop where I have a two-post lift. That'll make the job of removing the engine much easier. The factory service manual seems to want me to remove the engine and the transmission together as one piece, but that seems like too much work to me because I still have to separate them outside of the vehicle. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to split them right here and just remove the engine by itself. Through this access port, I should be able to remove the six bolts holding the torque converter onto the flywheel. Yeah, so I can't get this engine to turn over more than about a sixth of a turn because of the mechanical damage, and so I think I'm going to have to pull the transmission out with the engine. The problem is that if I can't remove the bolts between the torque converter and the flywheel, the only other way to separate the engine and the transmission is to move the engine far enough forward that the splines on the torque converter come apart from the transmission, which would take several inches, and I just don't have enough space to do that. So the plan now is to disconnect the driveshaft, remove the rear transmission mount, and of course, I also have to disconnect the transmission shift linkage. So I guess it's really not too difficult to get the transmission out as well. Well, that went well, but these Harbor Freight engine hoists are pretty sketchy, and this strap here, that's to keep this thing from tipping over when the engine is up high. I've got the engine out on my nice heavy-duty OTC engine stand. Now that I have the starter removed, we can get a better look inside the block here, and boy, does that look nasty. All right, let's get this thing flipped over so that I can get the oil pan off of it. Oh, yeah. This engine stand, by the way, I'm going to put a link to this down in the description because this thing is sweet and really sturdy. Don't buy the Harbor Freight engine stand. You want this one. I didn't notice it before, but there's actually a hole on this side of the block as well. I'm going to start by zipping off this lower oil pan here. So this oil pan has been off before, and somebody didn't have the right tool for the job, and they rounded off these external torques. Don't be that guy. Buy yourself a set of external torques. This is actually a really good one for a good price. I will put a link to this in the description below. When you need them, you really need them. Well, I'm going to dig deeper, but I mean, look at that. There's a lot of pieces of metal in here. Yep, as I suspected, the rear main seal cover is holding the oil pan in place, and look, what do you know? More external torques. Well, I'm already seeing some interesting stuff in here, but I just want to get this oil pump and this baffle off so I can get the whole picture. All right, well, this is pretty juicy. I mean, there's bolts. We have lots of pieces of cast aluminum like this that presumably came from the block itself. This, that's a bearing right there. It's all mangled up. The elephant in the room is this thing right here, which is a connecting rod, and it's jammed in there. I can't actually move it. Maybe if I rotate the engine a little bit, I can get this free. This is like a puzzle trying to get this thing out. Well, it's clear to me that this part of the connecting rod is what broke the block over here on this side. Hey, there it is. Look at that. Wow. I can also see the main bearing cap in there. Okay, so there's the main bearing cap. I'm going to remove the connecting rod bearing next to it just for comparison purposes. Oh, these are tight. The bearing on this is really bad looking. Oh, wow. Let's take a close look at both connecting rod bearing journals. The one on the right is the bearing that failed. The surface of the journal should look like polished metal, but it's clear that substantial damage was done as the bearing failed. The bearing on the left hadn't failed yet, but the journal is heavily scratched and discolored. A closer look at the bearing shows similar scratches and heavy wear. I don't think this bearing was too far behind the one that failed. The connecting rod itself shows that both of the bearing cap bolts were broken off when the bearing failed. The other end was later detached from the piston and bent after the bearing failed. Look at the texture of the two bearing caps. The one on the left shows evidence of the bearing spinning. So I think the root cause of this engine's issues is primarily a lack of maintenance. Specifically, oil changes. Do your oil changes and do them more frequently than the manufacturer recommends. This engine's issues serve as a reminder that you can run into some pretty bad stuff at auctions. And so when you're placing your bids, keep that risk in mind. I was going to ask you guys, what do you think I should do with this vehicle? Should I part it out? Because I probably could get my money back. Should I find a donor engine and swap it into this? But that's kind of a moot point at this point because just this morning, I purchased another one of these at an auction. This one is actually in Philadelphia, which is probably a seven or so hour drive from here, which is pretty far. But these vehicles are very rare. And the one that I found is a very low mileage example. I estimate that it'll probably cost me around a couple thousand dollars to hire a tow truck to transport it to my house, which is far too much money. But I also estimate that it'll probably cost me around $500 or so for fuel and a trailer rental for me to go pick it up myself. So let's go. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you in the next video.