XC70 Known issues

[timmassey1]

Morning, new member here, hope you guys can help.
I'm looking to buy an XC70 Diesel main use will be motorway crunching but every month I go offroading and it needs to tow my off road trial car on and off off road sites as well as get me home when it snows or is frosty. My budget wont stretch to new or nearly new so I'm looking at cars with 70K+ miles.

I figured that this was the right place to get some good info on real world experiences with this specific car.

What type of economy can I expect between a manual or an auto.
Are there any specific mechanical things I should look out for when viewing, other than the normal stuff you'd check?
How robust are these vehicles? Volvo's always used to be very well made, is this model the same?

Thanks in advance for your help,
Tim

[TiredGeek]

The best advice I could give is have a search
There's been lots of threads regarding this very question and too many answers to post here....

In brief, treat it as a V70 with extra bits. The AWD is expensive to fix, the suspension is expensive if it's 4C, otherwise standard S60/V70 things to look for

Tip: don't go for pre 2003 no matter how good a deal it looks.

2003 to 2005 will be a 163 D5 and does mid 40's to the gallon
2005 to 2007 will be a 185 D5 and does mid 30's.
Autos a couple of mpg less.

[60041]

I ran an XC70 for over 7 years. It was an 04 registered 163 bhp automatic.
Overall it averaged 33 - 35 mpg on short journeys and 42 - 45 on long trips; the best I ever got was 52 mpg on a long overnight motorway trip.
During the time I had it, it was faultlessly reliable, needing only tyres (avg 30,000 front, 40,000+ rear) an alarm siren and a couple of headlight bulbs.
I stuck with the original spec Pirelli Scorpion STR tyres, which I found to be very good in the snow and mud, yet were quiet and wore well on dry summer roads.
It was used to tow a 1350 kg caravan and I never had any problems towing on and off muddy campsites, but it was defeated once when my son got his car stuck in the snow and I tried to pull him up a very steep hill in about 10 inches of snow!
The early (pre 2003) models can suffer from AWD problems, while the later 185 bhp models have a potentially troublesome swirl chamber control arm that can be expensive to repair, so I would recommend that you find a car similar to the one I had which seems to be the model where they ironed out some of the problems of the earlier cars, but was before new problems were introduced!
There have been a few post on the forum about failed splined couplings on the AWD, but I certainly did not have any problems and neither have the 2 other people I know who have XC70s, so it is quite possibly a comparitively small minority of owners who experience problems.
If you buy an automatic, check that it works smoothly through the gears and change the transmission fluid as a matter of course; it is highly unlikely that it will have been done and, at 8+ years old, it will be ready. With clean ATF, these auto boxes are quite reliable.
If you chooose a manual, make sure that the clutch release bearing is not leaking and that the DMF is not rattling., as these can be expensive to sort out.
I was very sorry to see my car go when I traded it last year, it had served me well and I would not hesitate to buy another, it was only a change of caravan to a heavier model that caused us to buy a bigger car.

[timmassey1]

Thanks for the help guys, that could be invaluable. So a 03/05 163 auto it is then.....