I just finished a 4,100 mile vacation road trip in my 99 V70T5M. Starting w/ 45,000 miles on it, in the San Francisco area, we drove up to Crater Lake Oregon, northeast to eastern Washington, across northern Idaho to Glacier National Park in Montana. From there, we headed down to Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks in Wyoming and then back to California. The car ran flawlessly, despite temperatures the first two days that reached 107 degress F. I would say this is a darn good thing, since the only Volvo dealer in the western half of Wyoming is in Billings, which is nowhere near , for example, Kalispell. The only Volvo I saw the whole time in Montana that had Montana plates was a 740. On of the disadvantages of selling a car that can only be fixed with the dealer's computer is that you destroy your market in places where the dealer is far away.

There was a stretch of road not far from Glacier where I was doing 93 MPH, and neither gaining on the car ahead of me nor losing the car behind me. Despite this, the trip computer registered 26.0 MPG average for the trip. In Yellowstone, where you cover longish distances at 45 MPH, we averaged 28.8 MPG for that tank.

In Wyoming, while checking the oil and doing a visual inspection of the motor, prior to starting for home, I found a torx socket that had been sitting on top of the motor for 3,000 miles. I considered it a gift from my dealer for charging me $120 to not fix my air conditioning last month. (I finally fixed it myself by changing the A/C clutch.)