After just less than 4 months we finally took delivery this past weekend and are very happy with the van. After tooling around for a weekend and pushing all the buttons I have noticed that the normal operating temperature of the vehicle seems to be 90C which is not the middle of the gauge (normal temp gauge convention). The manual just says the temp can vary and shut it off if it tells you to. I'm not worried cause it's stable but wondering if it's the same with other people's vans or some odd Merc thing that I'm not used to?
Normal Operating Temperature
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It's normal.
Mine appears to be staying at 80 (really cold weather at this point (2019 passenger). I was wondering the same thing as you.
Brand new owner here, less then a week. I found this forum just for this question. I did a search to not start a new thread, but this is the only one i could find. Seems my new van, the temperature needle is at the mark just above horizontal. That seems like a weird place to put the normal operating temp, but its like this on all vans? Thanks for any others that can verify this.
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That's normal, and it is across the range of MB vehicles. I had the exact same notion years ago with our SUV. MB decided to extend the operating range on their vehicles beyond vertical, with white ticks going to 12 o clock and a few red ticks to 2 o' clock, and the red ones are hard to see (sunlight, sunglasses, ...) ... but considering all the ticks, one or two above horizontal is half way on the range.
Dash displays of coolant temperature at least analog displays are at best just an indication of temperature. My experience with a number of cars since 1996 (when OBD2 appeared) monitoring coolant temperature via an OBD2 scan tool connected the car's OBD2 port is the gauge is at best a sort of kind of way to know if the engine is cold, warm or hot (up to temperature hot). In the event of a real overheating condition there'll be a warning light or a warning message or both.
For cars coolant temperature has been in the range of 190F to 226F. 190F at highway speed on a cold day. 226F was at highway speed on a very hot day (ambient temperature 116F).
I have data logged my Metris some and once up to operating temperature the temperate does up to around 210/212F then the fan comes on and the temperature drops. Unfortunately this data is on another computer and is hard to render into something I can post.
But I am looking a coolant temperature graph and the temperature describes a saw tooth wave form. In one case starting at around 92F rising to a high of 209F in about 6 minutes of driving on surface streets before I hit the freeway. Then the temperature dropped to 183F in around 15 seconds (!). In about 45 seconds later it was up to 205F. Then it dropped again to 178F in about 30 seconds. And pretty much repeated this over the trip which lasted very close to 2 hours. This was I think the first leg of my drive from CA back to AR on April 24, 2021. I looked at the other data logged on stretches as I made my way east and the coolant behavior was pretty much the same. Probably had the A/C on too as late April can be pretty warm in the Central Valley where I started from.
Not the best way to show this but I'll post a pic of the graph taken of my Thinkpad's screen using my iPhone:
Trip started at 12:08:41pm and ended at 2:08:50pm. And pretty much the van's speed was in the 78mph range the entire time that saw tooth like section represents.
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