Burning Mercedes!

Today I was going to continue to talk about damaged cars but I changed my mind. I am going to tell you about the Mercedes Benz E320 wagon burning nearby yesterday.

It was just when I finished my lunch. One of the employees rushed back into the office from his lunch, saying “I saw a Mercedes Benz burning just there!” Looking out of the window, I saw the car in flames only about 50m away from where I was. I went outside to go & have a look. I could clearly see flame coming out of its bonnet. We could hear some loud explosions of the parts inside the engine. The fire engine and the police were still to come, and there were so many spectators around wondering what was going on. Never having seen such a dramatic thing before, I was busy videoing the scene with my compact digital camera. A few minutes later, a fire engine arrived and started hosing the car down. It happened to be the driver who was standing next to me. A policeman was questioning him about the cause of the fire. According to the driver, when he drove about 1Km after having the engine oil changed, he saw white smoke coming out of the engine compartment all of sudden. He was thinking about heading back but saw more smoke coming out, so he decided to park the car on the roadside; as soon as he opened the bonnet to have a look, it burst into fire.

His car was Mercedes Benz E320 station wagon a year 2005 model. To change oil for this model, because there is no lid or indicator for the oil tank, you need special tools to break the gasket and replace it with a new one. I do not know what they used to do this but they might have done it without tools by breaking the gasket but then finished the job without replacing it. You know, from what he said, I cannot imagine a fire like this could happen because if it was just a small amount of oil, it should just dry out.

It took more than 1 hour to put out the fire and a car with the value of JPY 3,000,000 was burnt to ash. Although I do not know whether this car was insured or what he is going to do to the maintenance shop where he had the oil changed, it is really wasteful when you can lose an expensive car in this sort of situation so quickly. This time oil changing caused the disaster but sometimes not changing oil can lead to a disaster, too. I will talk about this some other time properly but I realise that it is important to ask someone professional to do car maintenance. Yes, we are all professional at JPC. You can rely on us! Have a look at the photo of the burning Mercedes on my blog!


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
★ Japanese used car stock : http://jpctrade.com/stock/index.html
★ JPCTRADE Home page : http://jpctrade.com/
★ JPCTRADE Blog : http://jpctrade.blogspot.com/

(Editor)
JPC TRADE CO.,LTD.
Kato building 4F, 1-1-2 Furuishiba, Koto-ku, Tokyo
Japan Used Motor Vehicle Exporters Association (JUMVEA)
TEL : +81-3-5245-7731
FAX : +81-3-3643-4955