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20 Dec 00
Those of you who have read my earlier glowing tributes to my trouble free V70 should get a lick out of this post!
20 Dec 00
2001 Volvo V70 T5 S/N16044, 10500 kms.
There have been a number of posts on Brickboard and on Volvospy about bizarre behaviour of Volvo door locks, etc. This post presents my own experience for the past week or so.
After about 2 hours of mostly uneventful highway driving, slushy conditions, -2 C, I noticed that the message: "kms to empty tank", was showing three blanks instead of the 550 kms that it had been showing a few minutes previously; that prompted a quick look at the gas gauge; it was showing dead empty, needle hard left of the red mark but the little orange light was not on. Hmmmm?!. I knew I had not hit anything and I knew that the tank was well over half full, but I stopped and looked anyway, to see if any gas was leaking out of the tank. All was fine. Turning off the engine and restarting changed nothing.
I now pressed the system message button, and received the very helpful response: "You have no messages."
I continued on my journey, and attempted to wash the tailgate window; the washer did not function nor did the wiper. By now I am getting slightly narked! The windshield wipers and washers worked just fine. But I am saying to myself: "What is going to fail next?" I was soon to find out. Arriving at my destination I attempted to lock the V70, as always, with the remote. The six orange lights flashed but it sounded different; only the two front doors were locked. I was able to lock the rear doors by hand but had to leave the tailgate unlocked. Using the key gave exactly the same results. Hmmm?! Started the engine again; no messages.
Drove home, same route, same conditions, no changes and nothing else failed so far as I know. I got my wife's remote (it is her car after all) and tried it; same result as my own so it is obviously not the remote. I knew that I had at least a half tank of gas, but decided to fill it anyway; it took just over half a tank, 42 litres so no surprize there. When I restarted the car after fill up nothing had changed except the little orange light to the left of the empty mark on the gas gauge came on. I had never seen this light before; I assumed that it was an empty tank warning. I stopped the engine and restarted it; no little orange light and the gauge still shows dead empty. Returned home put the V70 in the garage and closed the door.
I spent a good hour looking at the wiring diagram manuals, TP 3943201. TP 3950202 and TP 3947202. They leave an awful lot out but I was able to locate all the fuses, some of the wiring harness connector points, some of the ground points and a couple of what I thought might be critical relays. Next morning everything that had failed that I knew about was still not working. So I pulled some of the fuses and replaced them. They were all fine. I checked all the connectors that I could get at easily; I was just going through the motions, after all, as my wife said, "The car is under warranty!" In the engine compartment I pulled a couple more fuses, checked all the readily accessible relays and pulled one relay, FM14, smelled it, it did not smell as if it had burnt, and put it back. By this time I had been working for an hour and had found no obvious fault; some of the connectors and/or relays might have moved a wee bit when I pressed them. There was nothing loose, nothing wet and no corrosion that I could find.
I put all the covers back on, put the rear seats back in position, and closed the tailgate; as I closed the tailgate, a loud click and it locked! This would not have happened unless I had changed something; I had not tried to lock the car since the previous day. I started the V70, and everything is back to normal and working just fine.
Unfortunately, when I was doing my checks described above, I kept no record of what I checked or in what order, so I do not know what single thing fixed everything. I believe that pulling a fuse or relay may have reset (rebooted?) a microprocessor in the rear electronic module, but I am open to other suggestions. Also there may have been a high resistance data link in one of the connectors that I fiddled with and fiddling with it removed the high resistance.
Obviously, with these cars, especially when they are nearly new, if something appears to fail suddenly for no simple reason, the last thing you want to do is start replacing parts.
Next time I will talk about my experience with ABS and DSTC.
All the best.
Robert A. Froebel
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