My station wagon finally died, after 800,000 miles, 35 years, and according to the service receipts from 13 different states, at least 12 cross country trips.

Maybe I could have fixed it but it was a little beyond my means. The pressure plate and the clutch plate broke into several pieces while driving up I-405, pieces of both were sticking out of the bellhousing. The disintegrating clutch left several deep gouges in the flywheel and a tooth is missing from the transmission's input shaft. The clutch started slipping as I was climbing the long hill out of downtown Bellevue, I've never even heard of a clutch exploding three minutes after it started slipping, so I soldiered on, assuming Vendetta would too like she always does. Of course your natural reaction when your car is slowing down is to press on the gas, which I did, the engine was running about a thousand R.P.M. faster then it should have been at sixty miles per hour, but I didn't think the clutch would explode.

She was still fixable, maybe, but there comes a time in a car's life when it wants to be tipped into a ditch, and that's when its clutch explodes.

Vendetta was a much-abused car, I'm amazed she made it this far. 800,000 miles is an estimate, the service receipts only account for 600,000 miles on several odometers, but she spent ten years with no working odometer, and given the rate she racked up the miles 800,000 is a conservative estimate.

I gave the engine to a man I found on Craigslist for free, removed a few parts to sell on eBay, and had her towed to a wrecking yard.

 

RIP! If I had an 800k Volvo, I probably would have kept it... How long did you have it for?

 

I Salute the Vendetta! RIP

 

volvo4life

 

I bought it for five hundred dollars in July 2008, and the only reason I paid that much was it came with a full tank of $4.50 a gallon gasoline. When I got it there wasn't any paint on the hood and it was running on two cylinders due to a broken plug wire and a fouled up spark plug. Also at that time I thought it had 271,701 miles on it being as that's the number the odometer stuck at, I only looked through the old service receipts to find out the real mileage when my mechanic suggested that either it'd been raced most of its life or it had at least twice as many miles as that.

People kept telling me that Volvo would give me a car if it made it to a million, but I think you have to be the original owner for that to happen. Also I only managed to put 40,000 miles on it in that two years so it wasn't going to be any time soon.

I think this makes 78vovlo244 the active member with the oldest car. I saved the radio he sold me.

 

that is sad.

 

Sorry for your loss...