Mercedes-Benz M275 / M279
V12 · turbocharged · petrol · 2002–present
Also known as: m275, m277, m279, m285, v12 biturbo, 6.0 v12 mercedes
Mercedes' twin-turbocharged V12 — the M275 and its successor M279 — in the S-class, CL and the Maybach and AMG cars above them.
It is one of very few production V12s left, and almost everything about owning one follows from rarity rather than from any particular weakness: specialist experience is thin even inside the dealer network, and parts are priced for a car that cost what these did.
⚑ Access is the constraint on every job. Twelve cylinders, two turbochargers and their plumbing fill the bay completely, and work that is routine on a V8 requires the front of the car removed. A job priced from a V8 estimate will be wrong.
Its known items are the ones any hot-V twin-turbo has — coolant hoses and turbocharger oil lines that live in heat — plus the ignition coils, of which there are twelve, and a fault on one is proportionally harder to isolate.
The M120 naturally aspirated V12 that preceded it is a different engine, and its results do not carry across.
Cars fitted with this engine
3 generations, across 1 make. From the authored catalogue — an absent car means the catalogue has not reached it, not that the engine was never fitted.
Information, not instruction
CarGeek is a reference, not a service manual. Its pages are written from public sources and from what other people have found, never from a manufacturer's own service information, so they can be wrong or incomplete for your particular vehicle. Some of what they describe carries real risk: high voltage, fuel under pressure, stored energy, hot and moving parts.
Have anything you intend to act on checked by a trained person against the manufacturer's own procedure for your vehicle. Nothing here replaces that procedure.
Posted about this engine
Be the first to write this up
Nothing posted about this yet. Whatever you found is worth writing down — even a dead end saves someone the same afternoon.
What makes one worth reading:
- The car — make, model, year and engine. The same fault behaves differently on each.
- What you measured, not only what you replaced.
- What actually fixed it — or that nothing did, which is worth knowing too.
Sign in or create an account to add what you found about M275 / M279.