Just so we're clear here I understand doing some basic maintenance on your own but how often has your car been to the dealership for service visits? I hope you realize that everytime your car goes to the dealership for a scheduled maintenance stop it gets hooked up to a mainframe in Sweden. That mainframe must have a heck of a configuration management solution in place because it downloads software (patches and upgrades) to the various components in the car specific to your chassis number as Volvo tweeks things. If you have been forgoing stops at the dealership you may have cost yourself more in the long run I'm afraid. My fear is that you may have missed several significant upgrades / patches over the past 100k miles or so if you haven't seen much of your dealership service bay.

Also, unless you can find a rare independent shop that can afford VADIS you should forget about avoiding the dealership. I've never heard of an independent with the interface to Volvo needed for these cars (because I heard the cost was something like $100k a few years ago) but there might be some out there.

Best of luck.

-rollie
rdollie@att.net
'99 S80 T6 (65k miles and Warranty Gold for piece of mind)
'01 V70 T5 (soon to be replaced by XC90T6 or Executive)
'04 S60R (maybe - if I find a buyer for the S80 T6 now or wait until early next year and do factory pickup)