I have exclusively owned and driven Volvo's for the past 23 years thanks to an ABS failure in a famous German brand vehicle in an emergency situation which almost cost me my life.
This thread is the "bitching tread" - only people who have had issues post on here and it creates a very skewed negative impression of the brand ... BUT ... the relatively small sample of people who post here as a percentage of Volvo owners is NOT statistically relevant.
It does not mean that I have not had my fair share of issues with my Volvo's, but then these issues were no worse and in fact almost always less or less severe than the issues friends and colleagues experienced on their German or exclusive Japanese brand vehicles.
My current concern is a diff whine on my XC60 - but considering that this XC60 was designed and built when Volvo was owned by Ford, and the underpinnings of the XC60 is the same as the Freelander 2 in which - according to the forums for that car - diff noise and diff failures are quite common, I cannot really blame Volvo
One swallow does not make a summer - isolated failures occur on ALL brands
and not only on Volvo's ... and the sample size of this forum is statistically insignificant!
(PS - this post is deliberate to invoke discussion!)