Buying Journey V70? Outside Salt Belt Advice For Newbie Topic is solved

[abscate]

1996-1998 are pretty similar for Parts availability. I would keep it simple with a FWD car especially if you think you will end up in warmer climates. You have to,worry about smog checks in CA, non- trivial if some does the mods like the CL car

$5500 for that seems a bit dear but there is a donkey for every seat....

[j-dawg]

Laying flat is important to me because I have multiple back problems, and I sleep best if I can lay flat. In my Subaru I can at 5' 9" lay diagonally flat, which is fine with me. Would I be able to do so in a V70 laying at an angle such as my head behind the front passenger's seat and my feet in the back corner driver's side?

I haven't tried lying down diagonally; maybe next time. Lying in line with the axis of the car, the length was adequate, but there wasn't a lot of margin. If you're lying down diagonally, it's probably not that different from your Subaru.

I plug this device into my Subaru cigarette lighter socket. It converts 12 volts DC to 110 volts AC. I even wonder if a Volvo V70 has a cigarette lighter. Does it have one?

Yep. Actually, I think my 99 has one in the back of the center console for rear seat passengers.

Also the aluminum body... I read Volvos have an aluminum body. Is that something of the past where ever since they were I guess in 1999 bought by General Motors that they then no longer had aluminum bodies? I thought 1998 was the last year they were actually the real Volvo company owned and operated by Swedish people.

Nope, all Volvos have always been steel-bodied. Ford purchased the company in late 1998, but the cars from 1999-00 were designed before that time. Ford always gave Volvo a long leash and let them do their thing, reaping the benefits by using Volvo platforms under Ford-branded cars; Geely, Volvo's new owner, seems like it's happy to continue the tradition. This means that everything wrong with Volvos is Volvo's own damn fault.

Also, for the first couple of years... do you find it true that if you were to include all the maintenance and repair to get your used Volvo up to par to figure on spending equivalent to $250 a month? I just want your opinion as that fact hit me really hard when I heard "Robert" the pro Volvo mechanic who does a lot of videos on YouTube say this. I was hoping he's mistaken, yet maybe that's the real fact of life when owning a Volvo.

I have a couple of cars, and the Volvo probably accounts for ~20% of my driving, so my maintenance bill is not that high. I make a point of buying quality parts, I do all my work myself, and I do plenty of preventive maintenance that isn't strictly necessary in the short term. I spent something like $800 on the car last year, though some of that turned out not to be necessary.

It is not always an easy car to live with. It has been the fussiest car I've owned, the rest having been Japanese cars from the '90s (excluding the Mercedes in my signature, which I just bought a few months ago). I also think that, if one is not going to work on the car oneself, it's important to find a specialist mechanic with experience in Volvos, which is not always cheap. $3000 a year sounds steep to me, but I could definitely imagine that in a rough year one might end up spending that much.

[EstVolvo]

Hope your Subaru keeps on going and you don't need a new car.
If the Subaru dies, I would check out a Sienna.

[abscate]

If you get a Volvo you can't afford sole, but a Toyota will take your soul.