1. Bought a used C70. Previous owner suggested bad motor mounts and lower control arm needed urgent attention with recent dated receipt from an inspection. We both missed the wheel bearing sound. (Humming sound that can be easily mistaken for engine sound especially if you have driven high performance exotics before)
2. Right wheel suddenly locked up while traveling 80 miles per hour back home. (Feels like a busted tire) Crawled to 1st mechanic at 20 mph. Last stretch of the journey was accompanied by violent steering wheel yank and jolts every few seconds.
3. Engine torque mount completely disintegrated and the engine was resting on the steering rack. When the car was on the lift, I spotted a torn driver side CV axle as well and some play on driver side wheel. Mechanic had hastily gotten the torque mount welded back in place and sent me home.
4. Same problem came back in 100 miles. I proceeded to drive it home on locals at 40mph. Home stretch of this 400 miles journey had me revisited the dreaded yank and jolts again.
5. Had a mobile mechanic came and put in a new steering rack after finding out the old steering rack mount broke under stress from ghetto weld and oversized torque mount bolt used by previous mechanic. (Steering rack is on top of the mount bolted to the subframe) The driver side tie rod was totaled before this anyway. That fixed the driver side wheel wobble. Swapped the ghetto torque mount with actual anchor and out went the driver side transmission mount and the passenger side engine pad.
6. Drove it for 2 days and similar yank came back. Car conveniently was next to a big car service center. Service center put in new driver side CV boot and lower control arm and swapped rubber transmission mount to a hydraulic mount. (Apparently Volvo had 2 brackets for 2 different version of transmission mount.
7. Shop suggested extra labor for driver side CV axle being stuck in transmission which should NOT have happened. After they were finished with passenger side lower control arm and a front wheel alignment, they took it for a test drive and they spotted bad passenger side wheel bearing.
Hope this workshop manual diagram helps put it into perspective. Steering rack rest on top of 28(Subframe) which is obviously connected to the wheel, the axle and then the wheel bearings.
I’ve found out Volvo’s reliability lies in simplistic design and thus low labor cost shared with Mazda and Ford, which can sometimes haunt you if you are not careful. My other car has a longitudinal Italian F136 V8 in it and that car took me 80k miles on a bad steering rack and motor mounts without issues. Volvo does NOT have such over engineered fail safe in place. Transverse engine also introduces instability.
I also changed out my own rotors, rear coil springs and shocks which might or might not have effed up the front passenger side bearings in the first place.
I hope this write up warns fellow Volvo owner of the little to none tolerance in our cars. Our reliability lies in a spacious engine bay and cheap fixes but we are not Toyotas, Hondas or Italian exotics which are over engineered for irresponsible driving.