Hello! I searched the S40 forum and have seen this question asked several times with zero replies. Hopefully someone knows about this and can help.
I have a 2008 S40 and the driver's side exterior door handle takes full pull travel to unlatch/open the door. It started taking more and more travel over the last few months and now it is out of travel and you have to pull it several times to get it to unlatch and open the door. Is there any sort of adjustment for the door latch? Looking at door pictures and videos, it looks like it uses cables but not sure if/how to adjust.
Any help you can provide is appreciated. Thanks.

 

I was trying to remove / examine the locking mechanism (it was intermittent) in the rear left door, and was trying to figure out how it connected to the door handle. Most other cars I've played with were pretty obvious - usually just a rod captured by the little plastic locking pivots. But I had about 30 minutes of fiddling around, even using a borescope camera to try to figure it out... but no joy. Strangely, the door lock started working halfway through this process, so I just put everything back together and tried to forget about it. I'm betting the best way to figure this out would be to go to one of the online Volvo parts dealers and look for an exploded diagram of the door. Hopefully that will be enough to give you an idea how it works (and adjusts).

 

Thanks for the info. The interior handle works fine and unlatches about mid-travel. I swapped the exterior handle itself with the back door thinking maybe the plastic hook on the handle was worn, but no difference. I suspect that either the cable between the lock mechanism and latch is stretched or the mechanism itself is faulty. Either way, not an easy fix at this point without disassembling the entire door. I was fixing it because I am selling the car, but might take the hit on price and let next owner deal with it.

 

I just looked up the diagram. Yikes... that's a complicated way to do something as simple as opening and locking a door! I'd suspect the cable that runs between the external door handle and the latch itself, though wear at any point could cause the problem. The only semi-easy fix would probably be if the problem was the door handle itself (looks like a little plastic "hook" does the pulling on the first of several mechanisms involved.

I know I just hope that I never, ever have to get back into that area on my V50 (same as the S40).