Today I took the leap and purchased the 1994 850 wagon I was checking out. Clearly, since it was purchased from a dealer, I did not get a -great- deal, and I'm extra anxiety ridden after driving it home (Ames, IA) from Omaha. The car runs fine, but since it's my first 850 (and front wheel driven Volvo) I have no idea what it SHOULD run like.

The first issue popped up 5 miles into Iowa. I noticed that the odometer is frozen on 91,104 miles. The dealership sold it to me as actual miles and is sticking firm to 'that's how many miles it has on it.'

I wouldn't have bought the car for what I paid, if it had more miles (like it does...) The Carfax I ran on it showed that it had 78,500 miles in 2003, so the actual mileage is probably close. It's also only had two owners before me, both from Champagne/Urbana IL area.

Problem two cropped up when I took a look at the coolant tank when I got home. I don't know if the 850 uses some proprietary Volvo coolant, but this stuff is not the green I'm used to. In fact, it's almost tea, brown colored. I hope very much that I don't have a leaky head gasket or cracked block!

ANYway, I'm tossing this introductory post to show some photos of the car and post a couple photos of the coolant tank and the most recent oil change tag (ha!)

This car is just a NA 2.4L. Judging by the cleanliness of the interior, and lack of ripped up leather, and cleanliness of the engine, it appears to have ~91k miles. Is there a way to hit the ECU up for any information on stored mileage?? I haven't found any places to buy factory service manuals or Robert Bentley ones (The RB manuals kept my 240s and Volkswagens alive...) This car appears to have been maintained by a nonmechanical sort of owner. Oil changes at Midas, etc.. However, it looks like things were done regularly. However, I'm paranoid that like most people, the previous owners only fixed things when they surfaced as problems.

A couple of things I'm looking for:

-How to pull and decypher DTCs. A location online, of a list of all the DTCs would be great too.
-How to reset the service light (I hit it on a search here already though)
-Any other gotchas I should immediately check... Do these things have flametraps like my 240s and 960?

So, thanks for any information, and sorry for the huge photo, but I tried to save it as a smaller filesize.

Thanks,

Luke