Old School Mechanic Please

[Nicodemus0]

I'll second the advice given by cn90 above, because I've taken it myself on a previous occasion. I was getting the same intermittent P0101 code for a few months. First came up on a trip and a Volvo dealership replaced the MAF. Came back in a few weeks. I just cleared the code, and took a few more weeks to come back again. After more extensive research on these forums, took it to my normal indy Volvo guys and asked if they thought a throttle body cleaning might be of help. They agreed that they'd seen that work before and took care of it. That was almost two years ago - no more issues.

[abscate]

The codes guide you to where to begin troubleshooting , they don't tell you what part to replace.

You see a lot of bad practice here, with people posting " my car is doing X, what part is bad?" Followed by 10 posts of " when I got this code, replacing this part fixed it"

That's a good way to run up a huge parts bill. It fails here because we are running 10-25,year old cars that are failing from long term degradation of parts that are happening 2-3x past life of vehicle

To diagnose, especially a poor running car, takes a scanner with a code reader and a readout of fuel trim, mass sensor, fuel pressure. The tough ones are always the intermittent problems like a stall out occurring every three days , but VIDA is pretty good at logging.

I don't know how any independent survives with so many brands today. I live in " money and brains" community that has loads of Volvos.... ....so our two see a lot of these cars. I also share my stuff with them

That was a perfectly good rant, btw...I'll add one thing. VW probably was on par with Ray Kroc to the concept of uniformity in service and franchising, in the late 50s, roughly same era.