I currently own a 1998 volvo s70 t5, recently my car has been parked in the driveway. It has 250,000 miles on it so i always figured this day would come. Prior to it "dieing" the car ran fine. A few weeks before it died, it had some odd idling behaviors where the RPM's would suddenly drop but then revive, i thought nothing of it b/c it was happening so infrequently, that was until i got a call from my friend, who i let borrow the car, telling me that it had just died on the highway. Once i got back in town i took a look at the car.

this is what the car was experiencing:
it would start and idle for a few seconds maybe even minutes sometimes
then the rpm's would drop and it would die
if you would try and start it again it would not hold any idle

i tried cleaning the mass air flow sensor, no luck

I am getting the codes pulled today so there will be updates,
any help is greatly appreciated

 

Cleaning doesn't really help these MAF's because they are electronic. Pull the connector and see if it runs. It won't run well, it'll still loop, but it should be drivable. That sounds exactly like a MAF failure to me.

If you can find someone with the same car and swap out the MAF's, once you buy them you can't return them.

My car did that for a few weeks and couple hundred miles before triggering the MAF CEL code.

 

Kristjan, are the RPM drops you're talking about before it died seem like the engine shuddered?

 

thanks for your help guys turns out the mass airflow sensor was completely broken so it getting replaced asap.

 

Wow! 250K !

I have a 98 s70 T5, fortunately with only 85K on it, so that makes my day.
I baby it (except for hitting a GD median the other day, broken drive axle)....have done
the new timimg belt and kept it up to date.

If you don't mind me asking --

As someone who "has been there" what should be on the lookout for?
Any tips?

 

By the way, as far as your problem is concerned....I thought my MAF was bad but it was
the altitude sensor.

Bought a used one at the scrap yard for 40 bucks and it ran like new.

Very simple part to replace.