Judge awards €17,540 after Mercedes fault
Then… crash, the engine seizes a matter of days after the warranty runs out. Dublin-based global information and database solutions provider Oracle Emea Ltd, who leased the luxury car for its vice president John Caulfield, is left with a vehicle that is going nowhere.
The sorry tale of a dashboard drama which continually kept telling John Caulfield to top up the coolant, despite numerous unsuccessful bids to track down a culprit cause, was outlined to the Circuit Civil Court by barrister Gavin Mooney.
Circuit Court president, Mr Justice Matthew Deery, said yesterday that Mr Caulfield had the car returned to Oracle’s fleet manager Tom Canavan Motors Ltd, East Wall Road, Dublin, for repeated diagnoses which had failed to reveal an interior leak in the engine.
The judge said water, through a faulty “O” ring on the water pump, had leaked into the engine emulsifying with the oil and causing eventual seizure of the engine.
Judge Deery said the true cause of the coolant leak and engine failure had not been discovered until the seized up engine had been dismantled in a Mercedes specialist workshop.
He said a Mercedes expert, Ciaran Kinahan, had also told the court that various Oracle users of the vehicle had driven it while just topping up the coolant when a warning light came on. Mr Kinahan had said they should not have done so and equated such action to a jet taking off with a warning light flashing.
Judge Deery decided that the one major shortcoming in the on-board computer system and driver’s manual was that they did not warn a driver to “stop driving” and have the fault immediately checked.
Awarding Oracle Emea Ltd just over €17,540 against Tom Canavan Motors Ltd and Motor Distributors Ltd, Naas Road, Dublin, for a replacement engine, the judge said the fault in the “O” ring had occurred within the warranty period.
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