I'm going to take that to mean satisfied owners...

 

There's a bit of variety. You have 240 owners and that sort, they know their cars inside and out, work on them all the time, some are real volvo aficionados. These are very tough cars. There is a some overlap mechanically in say a 740 and a 940, but maybe not as much collector interest. I don't meant to offend anybody 940 collectors.

Then you have the 850/70 front wheel drive crowd. These cars are old, super easy to fix, and very reliable. They are getting harder to find, especially in the junkyard. During this era, turbos became very common, which is good, and AWD eventually pushed the other cars out of the way, which is bad. The AWD "70" cars we had in the USA are all Haldex which does nothing in the dry, and in their old age, they don't work and they're pretty unmaintainable. It ends up just being an uglier heavier 2 wheel drive car. Personally I have a 1998 T5 manual, which is more or less the perfect car. To me it's a beater. To other people it might be their pride and joy. I plan to keep it forever.

In 99, the S80 came out and it had a truck version, the XC90. These were very very very bad cars. Very bad. Almost unusable. I guess a 5 cylinder XC90 is probably not really bad, but still Haldex and so just an even heavier heavier 2 wheel drive car with lots of luxury stuff.

The C70 more or less belongs to a different kind of owner. It's a toy, and being a toy, they last longer, and you have people who normally don't collect cars having something a little older than they normally would. It was never totally platform sharing with the other 70's. There were always a bunch of differences.

After the very bad years, you have 2 decades of various products that would today just be a used car. Volvo built a lot of turbo AWD hotrod stuff during those years. Some of these are fabulous. It's a different crowd, and I don't know anything about these cars, so I don't know where the active forum is for that. There must be one.

 

Wait until they get past 60K miles. Even then, since an owner cannot do anything to fix them, no use swapping stories on forums. There is a reason why the 240/7/9 forums are so popular. The newer they are, the worse they are, and that goes for all makes!

 

I will say this. They sell a ton of them. Sales have been increasing consistently under Geely ownership. I do see here occasionally people having software trouble. That might be the main problem with the newer ones.

I've also noticed that you can still get parts. I use ipd and fcp, and I don't notice everything that's available, but it seems there hasn't been any effort to discontinue parts on these old clunkers. I tell you what, I hit a deer, and it knocked out my tiny little grille beside the fog light. Volvo still offers that for like $7. They offer the fog lights too, but I ain't paying that. $250 buys a lot of epoxy, baling wire, and duct tape. Volvo has a Rolls-Royce attitude toward parts and I guess nobody in the parent company is trying to make them stop.