good gawd! wtf?!

What could have happened is that there was an explosion as a results of a fire, not the cause of it.

If the engine would have a small fire, the heat would weaken the hood and a small explosion as a results of that same fire could have ripped the hood open. I'm putting my money on that scenario.

Shit... I got an '02 E320, I'm sure that won't be covered in your service b plan. That sucks man.

Yeah, the AMG version is hot. I wanted to upgrade... maybe i'll wait for a bit :thumbsup

Did the engine catch fire and the Fire Dept. axed the hood open to spray it?

If the car blew up with enough force to shred that hood, you would have heard it inside the store.

the gfy scienctists are hard at work on this one :1orglaugh

seems as if you have at least one enemy

Fuck bad week for vehicles, my Hummer blew up earlier in the week :(

What the fuck happened there??

Ok who wants the easy explanation? Fuel lines run right under the intake manifold which is covered by a plastic engine shield. So you get a leak in the fuel line that is more spraying vapor than liquid. Cars get hotter AFTER they are shut off. Fuel vapor hits the hot manifold and lights. The hoods on those Mercedes are nearly sealed when shut.

Vapor + ignition + plus sealed hood makes the hood pop open like a jiffy popcorn container.

Go dump some gas in a coffee can, put the lid on shake it around till vapor gets going, have a small hole in the can, throw a light at the can near the hole. Kaboom.

Battery COULD blow up and dent the top of the hood (if it was under the hood that is) but unlikely it would do that much damage. This is fuel vapor plus sealed space, plus ignition boom! I think that is very likely what happened here. :2 cents:

damn..:Oh crap

Some one planting a bomb under the hood is much more exciting and capable of generating extra thread views though.

That and its more fun to yell PHOTOSHOPPED lol

Damn that is seriously some scary shit. Lucky for you, you were not in it.

I call BS.

the battery is in the TRUNK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Omg!!! :s

There's a simple explaination for this. Probably there was a leaking fuel injector, or fuel line, or the rail for the injectors or something, made a puddle of gasoline somewhere which igniting from the heat of the headers or shorted out something electrical...

I knew you had junk in the trunk!

maybe there was a fire under the hood and the fire department axed it and peeled back the metal to put the fire out

seems like what happened there

someone jammed M90;s in there

wow

something went wrong for sure seems like some gas got stuck and got sparked and exploded the whole engine

never ever seen something like this

fucken petrol + nitro = fucked.

nitro?

who fucking runs nitro in their MB

you people are fucking weird

told you not to borrow money from that guy

Ok, I'm back. No clear answer just looking at the car, but the best guess they say is that a fire started and then caused something else to combust. I don't know enough about engines, makes me wish I did so I could understand all that they said. They did offer me a replacement right on the spot, but I'm going to wait a few days, talk to a few people.

http://regex.info/exif.cgi?url=http%...tos%2Fcar1.jpg

EXIF checks out..

So what exactly did they say? There are quite a few gearheads around here, we can explain it in english.

well good luck on 150 exploding MB's :thumbsup

That is a cool website. How does it work? You can get all that info from a photo? That's the correct location.

I'm going to get it from them in writing and post it here.

looks like a terrible damage...

scan their statement in and upload it, post here after

Im pretty much going to say that if you look at my post a page or so back its going to match nearly exactly to what I said. :winkwink:

Wow that is nuts.

Any updates on this?

GPS coordinates and all. That is a neat site.

Curious to hear the final outcome as well! That's so scary because I drive a Mercedes too. Glad to hear you weren't hurt.