Hi everyone! This is my first post... HUGE thank you in advance for responding!

I have a 2005 Volvo XC90 in good working condition, but my ABS Pump recently broke. Given the used car market, I REALLY do not want to replace my car yet. Two questions for the group:
1) Is it safe to drive with a broken ABS Pump? I live in TN so very rarely have to deal with snow, and I primarily use the car for errands around town. I drive on the highway for about 1 hour 20 minutes TOTAL each week (a few 20 minute trips to the office per week). I have read that this primarily effects the anti skid and additional brake safety features, but as long as my brakes are fine and I don't slam on them, then I should be safe. Thoughts?
2) My car sometimes has a slight "fluttering" - when I'm accelerating, occasionally it decelerates briefly and then returns to normal. Could this be caused by my faulty ABS pump?

 

I had the ABS fail on my 850T - I found a used part (check car-part.com ) for a fraction of the cost for a new unit. The pump should not interupt the braking, it just means as you've noted you won't have the skid control so you'd need to modulate the pedal like we did in the 70s and 80s :-) That said, there's other ways the ABS can fail - you can get a stuck valve which will restrict flow to one of the wheels so do a test to make sure one of the wheels doesn't lock up on hard braking. The other thing is the ABS controller is tied into the transmission controller and the ECU so its possible that there may be an erroneous speed sensor reading (wheel or transmission) getting to the ECU. I'd suggest you have the car get a full scan for any ABS and engine fault codes to see if there's something else going on besides the pump not engaging. Note not all scanners will read the ABS codes so this may be something you'd want to have a Volvo friendly shop do if you don't have an OBD scanner up to the task.

 

Amazing! Thank you SO MUCH for that intel!