COBB COUNTY, Ga. — A Cobb County woman is warning other drivers after her Mercedes burst into flames without warning just minutes after she left the driver’s seat.
Channel 2 Consumer Investigator Justin Gray looked into the model only to find there were no recalls issued for her Mercedes SUV.
The car exploded outside her doctor’s office last July.
‘’It shook the building," said Amy Henry. “People came out and like, oh my God, a bomb went off.”
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But instead of a bomb, Henry looked down from the window of the doctor’s office she was checking into to see her 2017 Mercedes GLS 450 burning on the street below.
Henry had been behind the wheel pulling into her doctor’s office just minutes before the fire erupted.
“There was no warning,” Henry said. “No engine light went on when I was driving, nothing, no indication that it would just explode.”
Since then, Henry has been hunting for answers through an investigation of her own.
Henry reported the fire to police, to government regulators and even to Mercedes-Benz, who sent out an investigator to review the incident.
Nearly six months after the explosion, Mercedes-Benz wrote to Henry, saying that her car did not suffer from product defect or malfunction. A Mercedes spokesperson told Channel 2 Action News Investigates that they initiated a thorough review including an inspection of Henry’s vehicle and did not find a defect.
Instead, Mercedes’s letter to Henry suggested that a missing oil filter cap filter caused the fire.
But Henry says she didn’t have any oil changes or vehicle services where a cap would have been removed in the days leading up to the explosion, and that there were no oil smells or warning lights letting her know that something was going wrong.
“Literally, by the grace of God, I was not killed, my children weren’t killed, no one was injured, my house didn’t explode — but the what-ifs were there,” Henry said. “They should do something about it instead of waiting for someone to get killed or injured.”
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Michael Brooks from the Center for Auto Safety says even for federal investigators, it’s tough to identify if there is a larger safety issue when things go wrong.
“It really comes down to a kind of model by model, year by year, case by case look at what actually happened,” Brooks said. “It is important for consumers to report it to the federal government so that they can at least have a head start and a heads up that there might be a problem with those vehicles and they can start looking at it.”
He says the first step for owners like Henry is to file a complaint with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Channel 2 Investigates checked National Highway Traffic Safety Administration records for cases similar to what happened to Henry’s vehicle. While there is a recall for potential fire danger for 2021 to 2024 Mercedes SUVs, the component responsible isn’t in Henry’s 2017 model.
Instead, we found over two dozen other drivers of pre-2020 Mercedes SUVs with similar stories. A Washington family said their vehicle caught fire after pulling into the garage, causing a total loss on their house. It was the same model and year as Henry’s 2017 GLS 450.
The owner of another car, a 2016 350, said they were driving in the street when suddenly the front of the car lit on fire. They stopped, but they had almost no time to escape.
That kind of close call is all too familiar to Henry, who made it out of her car just minutes before the engine fire melted the entire front portion of her vehicle.
“I turned off the car, I jumped out and I said just give me two minutes,” Henry said. “This might happen to other people or has happened to other people, and they need be aware of it.”
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