Does anyone know if Volvo makes their service reps hit certain $ quotas for amounts of service? I am really suspect of our dealer after a number of incidents -- every time we go in the quote is $1000 worth of work, sometimes dramatically more (Don Beyer Volvo, Falls Church VA). For example, I took the car in for a simple oil change, they called and said things looked okay on the car (a few minor things added to $100 or so). Then they said their shop floor lost power. The next day they called and had found well over $1000 of additional repairs, and were suggesting things like replacing our entire accelerator because the RPMs would go up and down a bit at idle (hardly even noticeable).

This might be on an individual dealership basis, but it increasingly seems like they operate more to upsell to work that doesn't need to be done. They recommended replacement of brakepads and rotors and when I took to a secondary repair shop they said the rotors looked fine. I took the car in to have some work done, they took it for literally 20 minutes (I watched in the lot---it was there for first 40 mins then they took it to service), brought it back, waited a bit, and charged me an hour for labor (at $98 per hour). What gives? Is Ford doing this to them? They used to be more trustworthy.

I will be short and sweet. In a 30 minute drive radius I have 3 Volvo dealerships for service and they are all backed up with work. Add to that most customers just pay and don't ask questions, you will notice everything at Volvo to be a ripoff. Hence buyer beware. Here's a quick example for the timing and aux belt:

Bridgewater Volvo was $1,200, claiming a whole days work and would not let me wait in the visitors lounge.

Smyth Volvo was $750 with the highest labor rate of $120 (higher than Benz!).

Prestige quoted something like $376.85 for 1.5 hours.

Guess who won my business?

I'd have to say that Mike is the voice of experience on this one. If they charged you an hour labor to do something and did it in less time there is nothing wrong with that. Let's look at it this way, if they qouted you 1 hour labor to do something on your car and it took them 3 hours (for whatever reason) would you fell compelled to pay them another two hours? Heck no you would not, and believe me this happens often enough. Now let's say a technician has 30-40K in tools and 10+ years invested in his trade and countless hours of training and testing to stay on that cutting edge. You would want this guy to work on your car versus some newbie trainnie that doesn't know his butt from a whole in the ground. Now this veteran's experience and knowledge are going to allow him to bang through your service much faster than the newbie, so you should pay the newbie more because it took him longer and pay the veteran Master tech less because he hammered right through it and it is right and tight? NO that is not the way it works. You should be rewarded for your experience, talent, and ability to get the job done.
Now as far as quotas go, well yes and no. There is no set in stone "you have to sell this much or else" deal, but these guys (writers and techs alike) are pure commission. The more they sell the more they make. Take your throttle module for instance, it could be a case of a greedy tech/writer or it could honestly be a case of a master tech who has seen a thousand of these and he knows, based on the symptoms your vehicle is displaying, that sooner or later that module is going to take a crap and leave you stranded. Believe me if he is working in a dealership he probably has done a thousand of those darn things. Now VCNA (Volvo Cars North America) not the dealership has always got an incentive program going and there are a couple of things that factor in here, 1) your customer call back scores 2) the amount of cars you sell in a year and 3)the amount of parts you sell. The parts sales is usually a plateau thing, there are various levels that equate to various amounts of money and the number of cars you sell is your multiplier. You can sell the same amount of parts as the next dealer but move more cars and this will equate to a larger quarterly bonus. The call back survey figures into it also and if you are not in the high 90% range you can forget about the whole thing. Now this usually means anywhere from $500,000.00 to well over $1,000,000.00 in added revenue to the dealership and often times it is shared with the employees. I know that if we did our part we often would receive thousand plus dollar bonuses. So there it is in a rather larger nut shell.

Bonus $?
At my dealership, our selfish employer pockets every dime of his DOE (dealer of excellance) money SO we get nothing from that. The dealer that I worked at before tryed spreading some bonus $ out for a while but then decided that it didn't matter so he too decided to pocket that $ for himself.

It's not just a dealer only or Volvo thing. Most techs everywhere are paid by the job so they're only earning money if they're repairing a car vs standing around doing nothing.
An honest tech who knows the product should be looking for any potential problems as that's what you'ld want. You'ld rather know if your car needs brakes or has safety related issues vs being ignorant yet a greedy or dishonest tech might exagerate.
Being an experienced tech myself, anything I see wrong with a car is something that I can prove. If any customer wanted to see exactly what I was talking about, I could easily show them.
If you doubt or distrust the place where you take your car, just ask to see the car and have the tech show you exactly what he's talking about and why.