Lately my clutch has been showing signs of wear, and as such it has a tendency to cross my mind while driving. Today I was driving along remembering a hydraulics failure I had in the brick years ago, and I started wondering if using a hydraulic clutch is an advantage or disadvantage.

I don't really know enough about the differences to make a call either way, but I figured I would post it to the board and see what more informed people thought. As far as I can tell the only advantage to a hydraulic clutch is that it is "auto-correcting" and sets itself automatically. However, I would assume that you don't generally need to adjust a clutch very much over its life, so is this a real advantage?

When I think about it it seems like the hydraulic clutch just adds some expensive wear items to the system for a really minimal gain. I would think that a non-hydraulic clutch (lever? spring?) has less items to break and, while it needs to be tuned from time to time, is generally less expensive and less complicated to maintain.

So, any opinions or thoughts? Is there a reason Volvo used a hydraulic clutch that isn't apparent to me? Substantial advantages?

Thanks,
rt