This happened to one of my car pool buddies and I think should be of concern to everyone who drives a Mercedes ML430 and uses dog restraints that clip to the seat belts. He has 2 large labrador retrievers, the dogs were in the rear of the car (seats folded down and a bed of luggage) the dogs were clipped to the rear seatbelts using one the many products available for this purpose. These are big active dogs. After about 4 hours driving he heard one of the seat belts retracting a few hours later the other one did the same thing. When we investigated the problem, we noticed that the seat belt appeared to have been cleanly cut - not a single tooth mark (his first thought was the dogs chewed their way out). When we looked more closely at the car, the reason why this happened became clear - the ml seatbelts come out of a slot in the door pillar, the top of this slot is very sharp. The dogs are large and on top of baggage, so the seat belts were in contact with the top of the slot. After a few hours of wear, the belts were sliced clean through. Other cars in our carpool fleet have a different design, typically the seat belt emerges from the door pillar lower down and is guided over a roller at the top, because there are no sharp edges, this would not be a problem. What concerns me is that if the road trip had been shorter the belts could have been weakened by not sheared. In the event of an accident, they would have been ineffective. If they had failed it is unlikely that anyone would have been able to make a connection back to the dog restraints. The Mercedes dealer was happy to take his money to replace the seat belt (as by carpool buddy put it, the repair cost him $200 a paw), but Mercedes did not see this as a larger issue. I think that this could result in serious injuries or fatalities and is serious enough to warrant a recall. Thanks, ray

- Campbell, CA, USA