If you are an enthusiast of the automotive sort this has inevitably happened to you before. You bought a lemon, you inherited someone else’s problem car, you want to love it, but the relationship is a bad one. Darren recently wrote about his unfortunately sad experience with Merkur ownership, a car that I think we can all agree is  very cool. Well that got me thinking about the worst car we (my wife and I) have owned to date. The 2009 City Golf that we bought new and unloaded last November was a miserable ownership experience, however I think it is probably a close second for worst to the 1990 Volvo 740 GLE 16 valve that the Golf replaced.In 2007 I worked for an architectural office as a drafting monkey. One of the architects in our office owned and daily drove the aforementioned Volvo which he had “meticulously” cared for since he had purchased it used in 1994. From the outside the car was in fantastic condition, only one spec of rust, no visible dents, and hardly any scratches on its quirky, boxy gold body. Since I had a soft spot due to a magazine fold out from when i was a kid, I immediately fell in love with the gold brick that adorned our parking lot each day.
I asked the owner weekly to sell it to me. Finally, after a bad service experience at the dealership that he had always taken the car to (note to self, this should be a warning sign) he decided it was time to get a new car to replace the 17 year old Volvo. A week later he had bought himself a Toyota Camry hybrid, a modest choice by any measure. I sprang into action and asked if the Volvo was now available, and by the end of the next day it became ours for the “sweet” price of $1200! Along with the car came a 3” binder of records dating back to 1994, oh how I love a car that comes with history! This was quite a bit of history though; quite a few receipts from the same dealership too.Not surprisingly the car had a check engine light on when we bought it; since this was pre OBD2 days I was able to quickly diagnose the check engine light to a faulty knock sensor using the on-board blinky light diagnostic system. A new sensor was purchased and the old one replaced. The check engine light didn’t go away though, still giving a faulty knock sensor reading. No problem, I like working on cars! Time to get my hands dirty and go through the wiring….hmmm no breaks in continuity here… I can confirm that I ended up selling the car a year and a half later with the check engine light still on. That’s not a big deal really, it wasn’t causing the engine to run poorly, but I didn’t know that yet.Not long after buying the car it developed a surge or buck when attempting to accelerate, felt like major transmission slippage I thought. I got the transmission flushed. No change. The car died and wouldn’t restart when I stupidly decided to drive it to work one morning. It died on a busy street and I pushed the cars massive weight up a slight incline, which I had never noticed before, and into a parking lot where I immediately blacked out from an asthma attack. I spent too much money getting the car towed 15 blocks down the street to a shop which was (or so I was told) the place to take a Volvo in Edmonton. Turns out the surge/buck was due to a faulty mass air flow needle and sensor. They kindly fixed this problem to the tune of $450. Ouch! I was happy though, the acceleration was strong and smooth, and overall the car drove very nice after the fix.

With that taken care of I felt optimistic about our gold brick. My wife and I planned to take a road trip to Vancouver Island in the summer of 2008. I decided to take the Volvo back to the same mechanic that had fixed the MAF before to have the air conditioning and cruise control investigated. Later that day I got a call:

Shop: Is this Matt?

Matt: It is.

Shop: Are you sitting down?

Matt: LOL Wut?

Shop: If you want us to fix all the problems with your car you are looking at $6000.

Matt: *chokes* Can I just come and get my car?

Needless to say, we took my Civic, without air-conditioning, to Vancouver Island instead.

Our $1200 Volvo just got really expensive. I picked up the car along with the multipage shopping list of repairs and set to work. I quickly decided that cruise control is an unnecessary vanity. I ordered a new condenser core for the air conditioning problem. I ordered struts for all four corners and new bushings for everything. I replaced the leaky valve cover gasket and all the ignition components. I did everything myself with the help of my dad on his driveway. All in, we put about $1500 of work into making the Volvo liveable.The Volvo lived up to its legendary reliability for a while, with only a somewhat spectacular alternator belt failure in Lethbridge marring its record. The B234F engine is a complicated beast though, with two balance shafts, and two timing belts (one for one of the balance shafts); this engine was not for the faint of heart. Both balance shafts started leaking oil at the same time, and I was not excited for the daunting task of doing a timing belt on this engine. The power steering rack started leaking too, the rear main seal also. At least it wasn’t leaking gas right? Well maybe not leaking it, but burning an awful lot of it. Some other problem was sending the consumption way up too. We used to get a solid 9L/100km and that suddenly shifted to about 16L/100km. On top of all that I started to hear a *tick* coming from the head. The *tick* became louder in the following week. Sadly it was time to make some tough decisions. This car was not going to ever pay back the $1000 or so that we were going to spend to fix it. After fixing it would still have a handful of residual problems too.

After considering a possible Ford 5.0L swap it was decided that we would cut our losses and dump the sorry Volvo. It just wasn’t worth the trouble anymore and unfortunately lived up to all of the (mostly untrue) stereotypes about import car ownership. We sold the Volvo to a Volvo enthusiast for the meagre price of $900. He was quite excited to see the 16 valve engine when I popped the hood. “Do you know what you have here?” he said. “Really expensive and hard to find parts.” I replied. With that I watched the man drive away in our golden brick, our handsome square Volvo 740. Two days later we picked up our brand new City Golf from the VW dealership, our next mistake.

Much like Darren and the ill fated Merkur, I would like to revisit this, I think the Volvo deserves redemption.