Hi, I'm the owner of a 1994 850 I bought 2 weeks ago after the engine on my 95' 960 blew... I hear the engines in those cars were not so great. So anyway I riding down the road in the 94' 850 when the odometer and trip both stop working.... I rode for about 50miles and then it started working agian. Is this common? What should I do? I'm begining to think my car has more miles then the 124,700 showing on the odometer. Its a good little car but should I just go ahead and change the timming belt now it seeems like the true miles on this car is unknown... I guess I should have known something was up when the dealer told me cars 10 years are older in Ga are exempt from the odometer discoloser...

There is a tiny gear inside of your odometer which tends to loose a tooth or two and stops the odometer and trip meter from working. This is a common volvo fault. The instrument cluster has to be extracted from the dash and disassembled to replace this tiny gear. Check odometergears.com for instructions on how to do this and purchase the gear.

The timing belt change interval on earlier version volvo 850s is 50,000 or 60,000 miles (check your manual). On later versions like may 96 850 it is 70000 miles. When in doubt always do the belt unless someone was nice enough to put a change sticker on the timing belt cover on the left side of the engine. Beware! The 850 B5254 engine is an interference engine. This means when your timing belt breaks, the valves an pistons occupy the same space (which they were not designed to do) and destroy each other which will require a major rebuild or a new engine.

You can check the car's REAL mileage by using the computer terminals. On the 1994 850, you can do it in your driveway. Check the archives for how to do it. I did it and found my computer mileage was about 1k over the odometer, which makes sense b/c my odometer gear broke around 2 years ago, I let it sit for a while before I repaired it. Good luck!
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'94 854 N/A.

It's the rubber gear in the odometer. It wears out around 100k to 135K. You can pick one up on eBay for around $15.00. Takes about and hour to get the gauges out and take it apart to replace, easy with the intstructions available on Volvo Speed bay 13.