My 2001 XC sounds like a truck, with deafening road noise -- not from the engine. The dealer say the bearings are bad and need replacement. Anyone have a similar problem?

Tangentially, my car is 18 months old. It's been in to the dealer over 20 times for a wide range of problems. No loaner ever provided. Another difficulty is that the dealer stocks no parts at all. It also takes a week between the time he orders a part and the time he receives it. Shocking, to put it mildly.

Unless someone hit something like a curb or bad pothole, it'd be unusual for "wheel" bearings to just go bad in a '01 Volvo (or any with lower mileage for that matter). The #1 cause of bad wheel bearings is an accident of some type where the wheels hit something hard.

Now, the '01 XC has very aggressive tires and when they get abnormally worn (especially if never rotated as suggested in your owners manual every 7,500 miles) can get a bit noisy on some of them as I've seen that occur.

At most dealers, especially when under warranty where good CSI is desired, almost any part can be overnighted so that in a worst case senerio, they'd keep the car one extra day. That's what we do. We also provide rental cars. No dealer can stock every part for every car but the more common items should be in stock.

Thanks for the response on the bearings. I have no recollection of hitting anything and certainly no accident. Unfortunately, my local volvo dealer doesn't play by the same rules that you do. No loaners, ever, even when the car was 2 weeks old and was in the shop for a week. Unwilling to overnight parts, since apparently there's an extra charge. And even worse, he will not schedule an appointment until the parts have arrived, and then, it's an average of 5 days before he can "get me in." All toll, 2 weeks of elapsed time between original visit and a fix. Indeed, not stocking parts is one thing, but this type of service is inappropriate for a chevy, let along a 40K volvo. To bad that Volvo doesn't enforce some uniform minimum standard on their dealers.

PS. There's local car mechanic who does only volvo (probably has 100 used cars on his lot), and is fantastic. I take my 1994 850 to him. Gives you a loaner, fixes everything the first time, diagnosis correctly, is courteous, everything one can ask for. I've been pleading with Volvo to allow him to do the warranty work, but as you can imagine, to no avail.

Hi
We had a problem with the 2001 XC bearing; it turned out that the car had left the factory without oil in the bearings on one of the front wheels. The dealer checked this and replaced all the parts. We noticed the problem with in the first week we had the car.
hope your service department finds your problem.