Volvo 940 Turbo Wagon Wanted To Buy by private party cash buyer. 100,000 miles max. Looking for southwest/west coast car. Please, no dealers--privateparty owner/seller only. Needed: Photos, Auto. Trans., Clean Title, Current Registration, Maintenance Records & Buyer's Inspection (which I'll pay for) at nearest independent Volvo garage to you than hasn’t serviced the car. I am NOT a dealer; I am a private party buyer with cash. Thank you.

 

Good luck finding a car with less than 100k! Haven't seen one in years--last year was '95, so, not easy...

Personally I think people put way too much weight on miles--on a quality car like a Volvo there are many other factors that make for a good car, or a bad car.

 

yeah. shopping here in Volvo Nirvana, on the coastal outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area, I found a lot of 740/940 turbo wagons, but most were seriously worn out, with maybe 200k on the odometer.

I decided to heck with what the drivers seat looks like, I'll buy a nice car and go from there... and pop, this 745T on craigslist in Carmel (half hour away) dropped to cheaper, I'm going hem/haw, sounds like problems, wife and I go down to look at it, and its going to need a head gasket, its seeping a little coolant under exhaust ports 3/4. ok, the drivers seat is got a big gaping hole in the leather seat bottom. ok. I drive car, its in perfectly good driving shape, just a little tire. we offer the owner $1200, and she took it. I told my wife, this isn't a $1200 car, its a $5000 car. since I bought it, I replaced the bald tires (new michelin mxv4 on a set of hydra 16" rims I scored off cl), after the better part of a year of giving it a quart of coolant every couple weeks, the head gasket let go. AAA to mechanic, he does head gasket, water pump, hoses, belts, etc for $1200. I spend the better part of $1000 on suspension bits (struts/shocks, bushings, bearings, overload springs, ipd swaybar kit, ball joints, tie rod thingies, and new brake rotors+pads, and my mechanic charged me about $1k to install all that (hey, it took them way over 10 hours, I'm cool.

I scored a pair of grey leather late 960 seats off cl for cheap. clean them up, bolt them in, hook up the power drivers seat. awesome. comfortable butt for 4 hour drives.

a year later, the cheap front rotors I used wore badly and were pulsing under hard braking. ugh. so I just redid the front brakes with brembo rotors, and now its awesome, like a new car.

oh, lets not count the $500 or so worth of speakers I installed, hah.

this car had about 180000 miles when I got it. the hippie woman I got it from, it was her mom's new. hippie mom had been paying a mechanic in monterey to maintain it and got tired of the increasingly frequent $1000 hits, and hte head gasket was the last straw, thats why it was so cheap. the body is perfect. it has no signs of ever having body work. the silver clearcoat is starting to fail on the hood and roof, so I'll need to strip and paint it eventually. I have fixed all the tailgate rattles. its a little noisy on the highway with the 16" rims and bilstein shocks and ipd swaybars. c'est la vie.