Messed up E200 K Tranny

[Powerslider]

Let me start at the beginning...*sigh*
We had a '97 C 200, right? Sometime early on this year, the tranny died. My father was driving at the time and said that he heard a high pitchin whining noise from the engine....The car's acceleration gradually started to decrease. It stopped responding to the gas pedal and then eventually came to a complete halt.. The guys at the Merc dealership here in Jamaica said that we had to buy a new tranny all together!! They found aluminum gratings in the transmission and they said that this was atypical of an automatic transmission. So we bought the new transmission...and then sold the car.
Shortly after this, we bought a brand-new E 200 Kompressor. The same problem happened all over again!! So a new transmission was also bought for this brand new car, which, incidentally had under 9000km on the odometer! Can anyone tell me why this problem happened again? Or why it happened in the first place? Did anyone have a similiar incident?

[davis449]

My C 280's tranny was replaced after only 30,000 miles. From what I read in the service records, it just died on the previous owner. No real problems with the new one.

[nokia8860]

In the US with the 97 202 they started up on the new 5 speed tranny which was different than the 4 speed used prior, this also affects certain 210s as well.

There is a small design flaw which will break. Can you prevent it? Nope. It is a crap shoot if it will happen to you or not. In you case you rolled snake eyes twice. This happened on my 97 as well. I elected to put in a new tranny instead of a rebuilt and the new one was "updated" to fix this problem. Rebuilt 5 speeds are also "fixed". For 202 owners its mainly for the 1997 folks and some 1998 folks with the early 5 speed tranny.

And MB states because there is no recall there is nothing wrong... even though hella ppl had their trannys go on them.. go figure.