It’s about support. They build good products, generally, but everybody eventually has issues. It’s about what and how they handle those issues. However in the US they don’t support their products per se, they farm that out to their dealers. The dealer is not just there to be the go between, and act as a conduit. They are supposed to be the mechanism to support the customer end to end, even when the dealership is in a losing position. You can never remove all conflicts of interest as the dealer is never a disinterested party from their own point of view. The bottom line, is that Volvo is that the customer can lose in ways that just don’t happen with Cat, Cummins, Detroit and pretty much everyone else. Personally, I lost support on three engine rebuilds that started while the he engines were within warranty, but because the dealer had not understood an intentionally misleading service bulletin by Volvo they did not feel they should take the hit. True enough, but contractually they were/are supposed to be the fallback support mechanism. There is no escalation to Volvo. They simply ask if you would like to contact a different dealer. Why would another dealer ever feel that they should pay for something a different dealer was involved in. The fault is with Volvo, and only Volvo. So as a customer, I bore the brunt of two and a half rebuilds for a latent defect that Volvo had known about since manufacture and had issued in their eyes a bulletin for. In monetary terms, that was roughly $20k.
THAT is why I will never own another Volvo in my lifetime. Oh, and i did eventually talk with someone at Volvo, not just the dealer. No help. They could care less. I have a metallurgist report, paid for by me. I have found actual defective parts out of the engines, tangibly demonstrating they were in fact present, not just possible. I have an actual copy of the elusive service bulletin with matching serial numbers and I have a documented history of both failure within the warranty period as well as documentation of the dealer not following the prescribed repair during the period they were not aware of the bulletin, leading to more failures outside of the warranty period because the cause known by Volvo was not addressed. Open and shut? Not according to Volvo. Don’t know what more could be provided, but they were ambivalent. Talk to the dealer is all they ever wanted to say and these were the senior guys, not just the gatekeepers.
Bottom line, Volvo just won’t support you when you need it most, even when it’s as cut and dry as it gets. You won’t be able to control when you find yourself caught between Volvo and their weird farmed out support framework.
