Shed of the Week | Volvo XC90

Big Volvos are a Shed mainstay, and for good reason, so how about an XC90?

Sheds tend to fall into one of two categories. They're either older cars that have become cheap through age, or younger cars that were cheap in the first place. This week's Shed is a bit different. It's not especially young, but it is what Shed would call a modern car. It's also a luxury car. So it's a young(ish) luxury car that has become cheap because - well, let's have a look into that.

This Volvo XC90 - another Shed debutant - is a dealer flip with no sales prep done, so you'll be stepping into the unknown to some extent, but it's fair to say that a weekend's worth of deep cleaning could well turn it into something with a perceived value somewhat higher than £1,500.

It's a two-owner car with no mention of rust anywhere on the MOT history, though the 2018 tester did loftily comment on its underside being 'scabby and showing signs of age'. Well, it happens to us all dearie. The testing rules changed after that and there have been no sniffy comments since.

The XC's credentials as a family car are pretty much unquestioned. Penned by Doug Frasher, the recently retired design director of Volvo's Monitoring and Concept Centre in California, it is packed with thoughtful touches and is as strong as the proverbial ox. By 2018 not a single XC90 occupant had died in car-to-car accidents in the UK, which is quite a stat.

In order to pursue our rising interest in the XC as a practical but classy barge that moves the Volvo game on from the well-loved but getting on a bit V70s, we need to know two things: what goes wrong on higher mileage examples, and how you might add some performance.

Let's look at the potential banana skins first. Because it's a modern car, and a luxury one at that, the spec list contains much of the gear you'd expect to see in a new car today. That's good if it's all working, but bad if you're not a fan of automotive complication and the problems it can bring down the line.

Reflecting the sort of urban lives most XCs have led, they tend to have parking dings and sometimes issues with the door mirror glasses. Brake fluid burns away and bulbs blow more quickly than you might expect, but most other consumables like wiper blades, brake discs and pads last quite well.

On the mechanical side, the 2.4 D5 five-cylinder diesel engines are solid enough. Poor starting will probably be down to a faulty injector, and these are not cheap to replace. Alternators fail, and excess fuel can enter the sump during DPF regen cycling. The belts and pump need doing every 60,000 miles/4 years: the 96k/8yr-change tensioners are known to be the most fragile component in that package. You can expect to see around 30mpg on average.

The Geartronic transmissions that were fitted to all UK cars don't have the best reputation for reliability. Their modular oil cooler system was quite a novel idea but owners who were supposed to add extra modules for heavy-duty use like towing often didn't bother or simply weren't aware. Sticky servo valves in the shift mechanism have been attributed by some to inadequate greasing at the factory. There are reports of transfer boxes blowing too.

There was a steering-based recall in 2006 and it's worth checking the state of the engine mounts. Volvo seems to have had a problem getting these right. Shed's old V70 T5 felt like its engine was about to drop through onto the road at any minute. It never did, but it definitely felt like it might.

Getting back to the right end of the telescope for a minute, this car has only had two previous owners, and the April MOT picked up just one advisory: not one but two nails in the nearside rear tyre. Thank you Mr Builder. You'd assume that this tyre has been replaced by now. With some all-wheel drive cars you're in dangerous tranny wind-up water if you don't change all four tyres at once, but the Haldex system used by Volvo since 2000 gives you more latitude. If an XC90's rear tyres seem to be wearing more quickly than the fronts, it could be that your rear drive isn't working.

On the tuning front, you can get a plug-in chip upgrade for under £400 that will hoist the power up from 163hp to 200hp on the standard setting or 220hp on the gambler's setting, and the torque from 251lb ft to 310lb ft, or 356lb ft if you're feeling lucky. Being perfectly honest, the XC90 is a car that would benefit from an electronic kick up the towbar. These are beefy beasts that weigh in on the wrong side of two tonnes. When the XC90s were still new kids on the block, Shed had a go in one and was surprised by what felt like an awful lot of inertia in that 4WD system. Provoking it into forward motion seemed like quite an effort.

In an attempt to confirm his seat of the pants suspicions, Shed tried to talk his mates into the idea of hiring an old airfield to see how far each of their cars would coast when neutral was engaged from higher speeds. He was convinced that the XC90 would come dead last. Or first, if you thought that the first car to grind to a halt was the winner. Unfortunately, Shed's mates are even stingier than he is. They all balked at the £10 fee being asked by the airfield owner, so this potentially interesting experiment never came to pass. It's something for Freddie and Paddy to try out perhaps, testing different cars on the same tyres in a probing insight into how much power is lost through internal rotating masses.

Talking of Mrs Shed, bolster wear seems to be worse on this car's passenger seat than it is on the driver's perch, suggesting that it may have been driven in an angry manner designed to put the wind up an unwelcome and morbidly obese passenger. It would fit right into the Shed stable, then.

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Matt Bird

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