Longer story: early- to mid-December the car seemed to start wandering and pulling at lower/city street speeds. Less so in the Pure ride-height, but still exhibits some pulling. First assumption was that some ****-quality road had knocked the alignment out, so we drove it 200 miles to our preferred Volvo dealer (where we already had a appointment for our third HVCH replacement) and asked them to throw it on the alignment rack. They obliged, hurried through both jobs so we could make the 3hr drive back home the same day, and after charging $290 for an alignment, nothing had changed. In Pure mode, the normally planted, relatively sporty handling on the highway was onerous, exhausting and felt unsafe and uncontrolled. It was as if the car rolled (like a bobble-head) left and right constantly, feeling similar to the stiff off-road ride height. On-center steering effort was sporadic, and it seemed like the car was hard to keep in the center of the lane. All this time (and still now) the height changes correctly just as it always has. We do NOT typically use Easy Entry/Exit but just this weekend I enabled it to see if it acted normally when raising and lowering longer distances. All totally normal. I did find a few days after the alignment, (at similar outside temps) that the dealer hadn’t bothered adjusting the tire pressures prior to aligning (every one of which was 12-14psi low. After correcting them to 41psi, there is still no change in the ride quality other than increased noise resonance when hitting impacts. 320 mile round trip this past weekend was agonizing and almost sickness-inducing. I’m very glad to know that the system makes a big difference in ride quality, but I’m concerned that if I drive it 3hrs back to the dealer, since there’s no error message, they are not going to be able to recreate the problem.
I suspect that perhaps an adaptive damper has failed. I tried to scan the car with my OBDeleven, and it can’t even view live data in the Volvo. There are no faults (at least in the Engine, Transmission, and Battery modules, which are the only ones it displayed after a full scan.) We have a VIP Platinum warranty, so I’m not concerned with repair cost, just want it correctly diagnose and fixed quickly. Any ideas or advice?