That's becoming a major pain now in many states with '96-98 Volvos and other car types as well and it's pure BS IMHO.
If any emisions related repairs were done recently and the car hasn't gone through several "drive cycles", even though there's NOTHING wrong with that car those states testing those cars with THEIR emisions equipment is now failing cars for that. In the case of Volvos, Volvos own scan tool doesn't just reset that, no, one has to go through a very time consuming proceedure driving a car for many hours.
Now....as previously mentioned here, Volvo is suppose to pay a dealer "up to 3 hours" of time to do this BUT our dealer isn't finding this to be 100% true, each time requires alot of extra leg work and phone calls to the rep to get the time as the intial response is "no" when trying to get this on an older, out of warranty car. The cars we've seen with this bad situation also take well over 3 hours to get this cycle over with. We send out an hourly guy but that guy is really needed to perform other tasks rather than just be cruising the countryside to gets cars through emisions tests, it's a losing situation.
IMHO, it's really an issue that Volvo (and others) need to rectify with these states as this readiness BS isn't really an emisions problem or causing any problems. If that same car went through the "older type" emisions test, sampling at the tailpipe.....it'd pass with flying colors. It's also not right that because of this BS, both the owners of these cars and dealership people should then have to waste alot of time driving around to reset the cars readiness. There needs to be a better way and hopefully soon.