Hey folks, I'm new to the Volvo world (thought not quite completely) but my reaction on seeing XC70 back in 2001 was love at first sight. It became an instant dream car for me, but a little out of my realms of possibility. I already had a Ford E-150 (my dream van) and a '94 Miata M-Edition, so the idea of a third car (for a single guy) seemed kind of ludicrous. But as time went by I though more and more of getting a Subaru wagon as a winter beater to prolong the life of my van. But when I finally made up my mind to start casually looking around, I found that to get anything halfway decent with under 100k, I was looking in the $10k range. Then suddenly the lightbulb inside my head lit up and I thought, "Why not look for an XC70 instead?!" I know what you're thinking now; no this car is not a beater, but if it shares winter duties with the van (which goes anywhere with 4 studded snows), then both cars will last a lot longer. I'm sure I'm gonna tend to baby this one though, haha.
So here I am. I bought a Metallic Blue over Beige, 2004 model with 79k that presents itself very well cosmetically. It's friggen gorgeous! Not perfect mind you, but quite satisfactory. It had a clean carfax, no accidents, good service records, a new timing belt, and came from NJ, which is what we call a "southern car" up where I live, where the roads can stay salty for weeks at a time. Cars last twice as long there as they do here, and she looks clean as one could possibly expect- looking at the undercarriage and other tell tale places to look for the beginnings of rust.
So here are my questions and issues: Three days home, I started it up and it stalled immediately and failed to kick over after that. I tried a couple of times over the day but only got ignition once, then it stalled once again after 5 seconds. I just left it in the driveway (Sunday) and called AAA the next day and had it towed to my regular service garage. They told me it started right up when it got off the truck. The long and the short of it was that they found nothing wrong except a computer to computer communication problem that they claimed they fixed with some dielectric grease on the wires. It seems fine now.
But now it failed emissions. They asked me whether I had ever changed or ran down the battery. Of course I didn't know, and the PO never got back to me. Apparently the device which "readies" the car for the emissions testing machine had not reset itself. They told me to drive it some more, and leave it running without any accessories for a while in my driveway to hopefully trigger those emission sensors to reset. Anyone know anything about this? are these issues related?
Anyway, I'm happy to be here on this forum among kindred spirits, lol. I hope I can contribute with some of my own knowledge about cars. I'm pretty active on the Miata forum as well and it's even possible some of you know me.
Thanks in advance for any help!
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