I recently purchaced a certified 2004 S60R. A very impressive car...very satisfying . Now, I am certainly not one to ride the clutch and I certainly did not notice any performance issues with this car, until...about 2 months after owning it the clutch acted up?! The car has just 33k miles. I notice suddenly the clutch peddle was very resistant and vibrated upon release. Suspecting this to be a potential serious problem, I brought it into the dealer. The head mechanic took it for a ride and said he did not believe it to be very concerning and told me it would be fine to drive and I could wait to take it in. I did that, because they did not have a loaner at the time....and well I needed one. Well, upon driving it back home, the clutch went! The peddle floored itself! The slave cylinder completely failed [:@] !!! The failed components have been replaced, but I am a bit concered because no smoking gun was found....why would this happen?? Will it happen again? Did too much preassure build up within the hydraulic lines? 33k is just way too early to have clutch issues.

Any ideas out there???

 

It is a hydraulic setup and like anything else can fail.
It is not a common problem as far as I know.

 

Actually, it is not a common problem in the US, as there are relatively (very) few manual tranmissions. However, we learned last week, when the clutch went out on our brand new (5500 miles) 2007 S40 that this is indeed a KNOWN defect - the slave cylinder failing. The dealership we were towed to had not seen the issue before, but upon calling some other dealerships, they were made aware of the situation. Volvo has a TSB out on this, but will not recall due to the expense of the repair!!