My partner has a 1989 Volvo 760 GLE Auto, which has a rather nasty habbit of cutting out for no apparent reason.

Here is what happens. You can be sitting in traffic, or parked, or driving along the motorway, and all of a sudden the rev counter will drop to zero, indicating that the engine has cut out. If you are moving you've then got about 5 - 10 seconds to pull over before all the waring lights come on (in the same way they do when you put the ignition to the'on' position).

This is not a nice problem, especially when the car is moving. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to when this problem will occur. We can't seem to link it to speed, temperature, gear (hard on an auto!), lenght of journey (she drives long and small distances), or anything else.

We did take it to an auto diagnostic place and the chap replaced the ingition module and all was well for about three weeks, but last week it started happening again, with a vengance, cut out about 5 times on a 10 min journey, not good. I've got it booked in for the chap to have another look but this MUST be fixed, it's a major problem, and I feel it is endangering our safety, I've had it cut out on my whilst travelling at 70mph on the M25, and it's not a pleasant feeling I can tell you.

Is this a known problem with 760's of this vintage, if so then exactly what causes it? idle vavle?, battery? ECU? Any quick/cheap fixes for this.

Someone suggested that it's possibly dry contacts on the Fuel Pump relay, could this be true? would this cause such a problem?

any info apprecaited.