Went to the Dealer to have my Timing belt replaced and have the transmission flushed as recommended on this board. The car is a 1997 960 with 66,800 miles which I picked up last month. Well what a surprise I got this morning while watching my tech drain and drop the pan for the transmission. The smell of burnt fluid was there. The color was a deep dark red probably more a reddish dark brown. Don't believe Volvo when they say life time fill. Someone has one heck of a sense of humor at Volvo that is going to be very expensive to their customers. This car has every required service from 10K through 65K stamped in the book. Well I can tell due to a few tell tail signs that have come up that things were not done as stated. The up side so far is the car was very well taken care of and it shows. But back to the transmission the pan was coated with a nice dark film. You could not see through this film to see the bottom or sides of the pan. I figure this coating was from the transmission fluid breaking down. The 4 magnets in the pan on the up side were clean with almost zero debris on them.
If you are thinking about putting off a transmission flush and you have over 50K miles on the fluid, DON'T!!!.
I may have been able to run this car another 40K miles but sooner or later that transmission would have been damaged by the old fluid put in at the factory 8 years ago. Well with it now filled with Redline D4ATF, I shouldn't have to worry about the transmission for at least another 30K.