I can't believe it. At only 78K miles I have to replace the Throttle Control Unit? Are you kidding? I just got the estimate at $910.00. I've only had this car for less than 2 months and will have already put $2K into it after this repair. Damn, I miss my Lexus!

Has anyone ever had any luck talking to the Volvo factory service rep. before? A major component like this should not fail before 100K miles. I've had Lexus and Nissan both cover major failures after the warranty with no problem. I plan on calling Volvo tomorrow. I'll keep you posted as to what happens.

I feel your pain. Volvo really has done a poor job with this problem. The company seems more concerned about customers that buy or lease new products then customers that maintain older (over 50,000 miles) vehicles. My wife and I have a '99 V70 XC and the electronic throttle control unit began to fail at 65,000. We had it replaced at 69,000. Some Volvo dealers sell the replacement unit for as little as $420.00 bucks, so be warned that your dealer could be marking his part up. I called three dealers and they all had different prices. Some were as much as $580.00 for the same part. I recommend you get a price quote from the cheapest dealer and present that to your local dealer and ask why they are overcharging you (marking the price up so much). I love my Cross Country but my 740 is relatively "low tech" and doesn't have these problems. Our vehicles are Volvo's first attempt to control engine speed without a throttle line. It's like the first car with fuel injection, great idea, but improvements must be made. Your XC is one of the safest wagons available on the market. I know how you feel though, when this happened to me the stream of profanity that came from my mouth could be heard around the world. Food for thought.....

Make sure you let Volvo know how you feel.....

Common, known problem but the car is way out of its 4 yr/50K mile warranty. Volvo will not help you with this and you're not the first who's tryed. Sorry for the bad news but we see this often.

My 2002 V70 had to have its Electronic Throttle Control replaced at 15,500 miles! so, needless to say I don't have much faith in this part especially since it was totally redesigned for 2002! back to the drawing board !

oh, and the brake pedal position sensor was also replaced at 12,000 miles.

It makes me wonder how long it will be before the remaining sensors are going to fail.

any other known sensor failures I should be aware of Frank?


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You will never leave where you are until you decide where you would rather be.

Believe it or not, the re-designed '02 on up throttle units are holding up far better than the older type and your 2 parts going bad are very unusual from what we see. I'd also guess that you didn't really need a pedal position sensor as a code for that part often also appears with throttle unit codes (probably misdiagnoses, mis-guessed, over-kill IMO). We usually clear, ignore that code when also getting codes for internal throttle unit failure and the pedal sensor code doesn't return afterwords.
As for other sensors failing, yes we do occasionally see a few others (nothing universal so far) but the '02s on up are still newer so it's too soon to speculate what other possible problems you might have in your future. I don't have a crystal ball and don't like guessing.