Helping independent workshops like yours for two decades

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: What do you get when a marketing guy walks into a room full of engineers? No? Nevermind. But that’s literally how StarTuned got started.

20 years ago this month, a team at Mercedes-Benz USA collaborated with Automotive Data Media, a leader in industry publications, to launch what had been a pet project for quite some time: A new magazine, dedicated to getting practical repair knowledge out to the tens of thousands of independent workshops and technicians who were keeping the fleet of millions of Mercedes-Benz vehicles running. Long before, it was well-understood at MBUSA that without these independent workshops it would be impossible to service, repair and maintain all the cars on the road. Since the drivers of these cars were all still Mercedes-Benz customers, the reasoning went: Why don’t we help make the technicians who maintain and repair them even better at performing repairs?

Since then, we’ve covered hundreds of different subjects, from A/C to XENTRY, all written by working technicians for working technicians. Mercedes-Benz is no stranger to long-term thinking — we’re about 134 years into this ‘automobile’ thing — and although 20 years almost pales in comparison, we thought we should celebrate the beginning of our third decade and our mission to support hard-working technicians everywhere.

In all those years, the impact of this humble magazine on customers and technicians has been immeasurable. While it’s difficult to put into numbers, many more vehicles have been repaired to the high standards of Mercedes-Benz because of the highly-detailed explanations and practical experience shared by dozens of technician-writers over the years.

We never wanted to deliver theoretical engineering dissertations, since that is just not as useful as having working technicians like you who have a knack for explaining what they know. You’ve probably encountered someone like that, one who always seems to be helping and mentoring others — you might even be like that yourself — and we keep searching for them, and asking them to write and share what they know. And they do. And every work is carefully verified by our engineers to make sure nothing but the most accurate information appears on these pages.

While we at StarTuned are happy to celebrate this rare and wonderful milestone, and we marvel at how much has changed in all these years, we remain focused on our core purpose: Offering professional, competent and useful technical support to our essential business partners, the tens of thousands of independent workshops and their myriad expert technicians. By the way, if there is something you’d like to see in these pages, please be sure to drop us a line. After all, everything we do, we do for you.