1998 V70 XC AWD Advice.

Hello, first off thanks in advance to anyone who chimes in. I know I could probably gather everyones opinions about this car, but I am just really curios what my options are.

I have a 1998 V70 XC with about 80k miles. I am the third owner and I paid about 1/4 of bluebook price, so when I received it, I didn't spend a lot of money attain it. I bought it from a friend, not knowing about the problems.

It has a little bit of smoke on startup and acceleration sometimes, not big deal, but the main thing is the oil leak. The owner I bought it from said, yeah, it uses oil. I said, it burns oil, leaks oil, what?? They didn't know anything about cars, and just said again, it uses oil.

It has had great maintenance besides that, drives great, comfortable etc. The only thing is that is uses and leaks a lot of oil. Lets say, the engine could go bone dry in maybe 4 months.

I have always taken my volvo's to the smaller shops where I live, the larger shops always assume I have as much money as a BMW driver and don't mind giving out a $800 bill for an oil change and replacing filters. So my cheaper guys said yeah, it leaks but we can't tell where its coming from because of how messy and grimy it is down there.. So they said, first do the BREATHER BOX, and I did that, now they want to do the Turbo tubes and bunch of other tubes.

I think its the REAR CAM SEAL, or something else that can't be fixed easily, because the previous owner said that she asked her mechanic to fix the leak, and he said it would be chapter and easier to just put oil in it.

I bought the car for less than 3k, so do I put the energy and work into fixing it? Get a new Engine, get a used ENGINE?? Then replace all the lines and whatever else… My only worry about this is the other things on this car that can go wrong, is it a good investment?? Now that I put in a new or used engine, now everything else is old.

Thanks for any advice. I am in Portland Oregon, so any recommends on people who do overhauls of this nature on a regular basis would be great.

 

With only 80k on the clock in 15 years, it must have sat for long chunks of time. My first thought then is that one or more of the oil lines may have rotted through. There's no reason to think the turbo itself would be bad after so little driving, but the lines that feed it with oil might be. Tracking down those leaks is a huge pain, and I know a lot of mechanics don't like to do it. It's a large time investment and there's no guarantee they'll fix the problem - leads to a lot of unhappy customers and wasted shop time.
As for the smoke: is it a dark blueish-grey? If so, has a mechanic done a compression test? A car burning oil usually means bad valve seals, and compression tests are a simple/quick way to check.
From a purely economic perspective, any shop repair is going to be at least a few hundred dollars. You can buy a lot of oil for a few hundred dollars. So my first priority would be fixing the smoke problem - you don't want to end up with a broken catalytic converter or O2 sensor. As for the leak(s), maybe solving the smoke problem will make the source of the leaks apparent.