My wife has an S70/2000 and loves it. 50,000+ miles so far and very few problems. Today she went to start the car and it would only run for a few seconds. This problem happened several times. Very fortunate that my dad is a mechanic. Volkswagen, Porsche, Mercedes, Audi are his specialty, but he works on all makes. I had it towed to his shop. Of course, the car starts the first time and runs perfectly. He has the OBDII computer scanner and it came up with an error code #1670 "immobilizer" and nothing else. The car started over 20 times and ran all day (used to chase parts and pick up customers). He has never seen/heard of this problem. He spoke with a few of his buddies and neither had they. I called the dealership and they said the "immobilizer" like all electrical parts will fail. The immobilizer is the anti-theft device that requires the chip in the Volvo key to match with the immobilizer computer in the steering column. The dealer said they can replace the immobilizer and keys, and also re-program the ECM with the "VADIS" software download at a cost of $400. I decided to check this site and see if anyone had similar problems, but didn't find anything. Does anyone have an idea of what might be going wrong?

This problem has come up on UK cars quite a bit.

The problem is usually a poor contact on the lead to the anntena ring round the lock barrel. The cure to simply remake the connector at the anntena a few times to clean it.