My car's problem was resolved easily, but there's a minor thing from the symptoms that's bugging me. I have a '97 E320 MB with the M104 engine with about 205K miles on it. I've owned it for over a decade and over 100K miles of it's life. About 3 years ago it got an OBD2 code for the cam position sensor, but the car seemed to be running fine. After checking that the electrical connector appeared to be solid and still clicked in position I ordered a replacement sensor. The OBD2 code cleared itself before the part arrived, so I didn't bother to install the sensor. Over the most recent couple months and maybe 25K miles later, the code came back and then would clear itself and come back repeatedly. Finally it got to the point where I thought I could sometimes maybe feel a difference when the CEL was on, and that the car was going into some minor version of limp home mode, so I went ahead and replaced the sensor. The electrical connectors were weather tight and might as well have been hermetically sealed from the factory, they were so perfectly clean and shiny. The new (well, after 3 years on my shelf) sensor made the code clear, and it's been gone for a couple weeks now. My question to you guys is, since this thing is basically a hall effect sensor and the connector was perfect, how is it even possible for it to have had an intermittent fault? I don't get it. Oh, and I have an OBD2 dongle on there all the time and use the torque app on my phone. The only code I was getting was for the CPS.
Anyone know how a cam position sensor can fail sporadically like this?
