Scott,

I had the same problem happen to me just today, when i was trying to go to church in the morning. I have a '98 S70 GLT with 56,200 miles on it. The battery first died a couple weeks ago, I screwed off the cell tops and saw that there was barely any water inside, so I filled them all up with distilled water. I then charged the battery with a Sears portable battery charger. So after that I thought the battery was fine until this morning. I checked the level in the battery, pretty full. So then I got the charger out again hooked it up, to my amazement the charger needle quickly went from 10 amps to 2 in the matter of 10 minutes. Usually it would take a couple of hours. Anyway I unhooked the charger got into the car and tried to turn it on. The car didn't start. Either something was causing the battery to discharge again or it was near death. I hooked up the charger again and waited a half hour. Afterward I was able to turn the engine on, for 15 minutes I sat inside pushing the pedal to 2000 rpm to see if I can recharge it some more. Then to test it I turned the car off, back on again, off again. I tried one more time and the battery was dead again. It was the OEM battery as far as I could tell, the previous owner racked up 36,000 miles on it before I got the car. So 56,000 miles out of the battery is not too bad. Tomorrow I'm going to charge it for about an hour so it has enough juice to start so I can drive to the store and get a new battery installed.

Nick W.