Hi everyone,

I'm asking this question out of curiosity. My Volvo mechanic has a customer who has a '98 V70 non-turbo with just over 166K km (~104K mi) on it. About a week ago the car was towed to the shop. The customer's wife had started it up in the morning and drove for about 2 minutes when the engine just decided to quit. My mechanic checked all kinds of things. He tried swaping things like the cam sensor and nothing helped. (I must mention that the engine had once before not started due to the common collapsed lifter problem. At that time and engine flush and oil change seemed to solve the problem). The second time he managed to get the car started after a few days and it appeared to be collapased lifters again. Yesterday the car died again on the hwy(!). It was towed back to the mechanic and when he tired to start it it sounded and acted as though the lifters had collapsed. Eventually after trying and trying (poor starter) he got it going. He added an engine flush and then changed the oil to Amsoil 10W40 synthetic (was non-syn 10W30 before). The car appears to run fine now. Has anyone ever heard of lifters failing while driving???? My mechanic and I can't believe that it's possible. I though it could be some sort of problem with oil pressure or something, but it doesn't really show any other signs of that. I don't get it and neither does my mechanic. I don't think the car has really been abused. It seems as though the original owner had it properly serviced by Volvo and the current owner has taken acceptable care of it. I just don't get how the lifters could fail while the engine was running. They usually fail while the car sits and then it won't start........Hopefully it's ok now, but I wanted to hear input from you guys who may have encountered this problem before.
--
Chris. Halifax N.S. '91 745Ti, 289K km and '91 745 NA, 375K km.