So yesterday afternoon, I took my "07 base coupe in to the O"Brien dealership in Pekin cause my spoiler had recently malfuctioned. Needless to say, they did fix it, and pretty quick, as they found the problem and fixed it by about 11:30 this morning. However, when I went to pick it up today, after driving off the lot, I noticed that the airbag light was on (it wasn't when I brought it in). I promptly pulled over to see if turning the car off and then back on would do anything. Nothing. End of story goes that I brought it back to the dealership in the next 5 mins to have them fix that. Also they wouldn't give me a loaner of any sort.

Basically my questions are:

Do you think they could have tripped a wire or something of the like when they were fixing the wiring for the spoiler?

and

What is better: a "Crossfire Tech" that was trained by Chrysler or a "Crossfire Tech" that had worked for Mercedes before?

(oh, and also, just to vent...... WTF????)

 

Check and make sure that they didn't turn off the passenger side air bag before fixing your other problem if they did the light will stay on after starting the car.

 

Checked and yep.

 

Resetting the airbag light is typically a easy plug-n-go situation. The dealer can do it in a matter of minutes. Sometimes it can be tripped just by disconnecting the airbag even temporarily and then putting the keys in the ignition and turning it to -on. However if they actually damaged a part of the airbag wiring then it would be more difficult to repair. I am betting that it is the former that happened.

 

Well I guess we'll see. I watched as they tried many different things today for about 30 mins, so I don't know if it's as simple as that.

 

Hmm they must have tripped something. That is a pain because its hard to figure out what it is that's causing it! They will figure it out... I hate going to the stealerships.

 

See my thread "service snafus" under the roadster part of the forum. It appears that even the simple probs get mucked up because the techs don't diagnose the faults correctly and the dealerships are so slow now, even the service depts. that is seems that anytime they can drum up more business and manual hours they do.

 

All warranty work. Was completely free for me. But I do agree with you. They overlook certain things that would cause simple problems to become pains.

Turns out it was as easy as that. They forgot to reset the airbag system after unattaching the plug for the BCM. Also, when they tried scanning it for error codes the first time, they scanned it with the wrong plug, so nothing at all came up. Basically rescanned it with the right plug (after calling the Chrysler Coporation themselves for help) and reset the airbag system. Now everything's fine.


As for my second question again, which do you think is better:

Having a dealer that has a "Crossfire Tech" that worked for Mercedes and then was trained to work on Chryslers, or a tech that was trained by Chrysler to work on Crossfires?

 

The Crossfires are a LOT more Mercedes than Chrysler. If the dealership has a "Crossfire Tech" I would be willing to bet that he was the only one at the dealership willing to go to a very brief training course. Vehicles like the Crossfire are always treated as the red headed stepchild at the dealers. The Chrysler techs would much rather work on the main line of vehicles due to product knowledge and the potential of actually making some money on the familiar repairs and services.
I would also be willing to bet that if you do find a "Crossfire Tech" he is an hourly employee, due to the lack of training and product knowledge , the dealer can hand him a problem with your car and allow him to plow around on your car until he either gets lucky, or the Chrysler tech line helps him or else a real tech in the dealership comes over and explains the basics to him so that he can perform at least the very basic of repairs.
If you can find an experienced Mercedes tech willing to work on it, that is what I would/will do.

I would like to know just what percentage of the Crossfire is actually Chrysler... other than the display on the radio and the badges, what is actually made by Chrysler??

 

Apparently 11% is Chrysler only. What is in the 11%, I do not know.

 

Just the body.

 

I thought the body was "Karmann".
I just pulled this from an automobile info site.....


"An interesting fact about the Chrysler Crossfire is that it is actually manufactured by the Karmann company is Osnabrueck, Germany and that approximately 40% of its building components are the same as those used for Mercedes cars."

I don't believe everything I read on the internet, but I have seen this several times before.

 

what constitutes 1%? is it based on mass/volume of parts or just number of parts.

 

Again, no clue. But a massive amount of parts in this car are ones that were manufactured by mercedes and redesigned in some way to work in the Crossfire. I think the body was actually accredited to the English guy that designed the Crossfire.

 

I don't believe that's true. However, you have to define, what makes something chrysler. If you mean it has parts that are american made by the chrysler corporation, then it is WAY less than 11%. According to the window sticker on my 2008 Crossfire, in fact, it's 0% American/Canadian parts content.

Interestingly, my headlights are made in austria, wheels from Poland, and tires from czech republic. So there's lots of euro stuff on the car, from lots of different countries. From the US, however, there's nothing, which to me means that aside from some engineering and design input, few, if any US workers were directly involved in the production of parts for the crossfire.