EuropeanCarBlog

You are in a parking lot and someone shoves a shopping cart into your car or backs into you or your kids pull a Radio Flyer wagon down the driveway and let it run into your car (it happened to me). The headlight gets hit and amazingly enough you only have a scratch in the plastic lens that buffs out. While working on the scratch you notice that the headlight is lose. Upon further investigation you see that some of the mounting tabs are broken off. This would normally call for a replacement of the complete headlight assembly (or a lot of superglue or duct tape, I have been guilty of that too).

If you own one of the following Mercedes cars, this information might save you a few hundred bucks:

• 2001 2007 C-class
• 2003 - 2007 CLK-class
• 2003 - 2007 E-class
• 2007 - S-class
• 2005 - 2007 SLK-class
• 2003 - 2007 SL-class
• 2006 - 2007 R-class
• 2006 - 2007 M-class
• 2007 - GL-class

For the above vehicles Mercedes offers a replacement tab, they call it a repair fixture. The mounting tabs on the headlights were designed to break at specific points to save the assembly from being crushed at low impact crashes.

The repair is simple, the broken tab must be filed off and the new tab screwed in place.

Of course most places would rather sell you a headlight assembly for a few hundred Dollars. While making a sale sounds good to us, we would rather tell you about the cheaper fix and leave some Green in your wallet.