My wife has a 98 V70, not AWD or anything, just a straight up V70. Starting last fall I noticed it if was raining out pretty good the car wouldn’t turn over, it would get close, but not actually turn over. Then after several attempts it would turn over but idle really rough and if you put it in gear it would stall. Eventually, after some time you were able to drive it but it would take upwards of 30 minutes. I had forgotten about it because over the winter she never had the problem and it just slipped my mind. Well, on Saturday we had some heavy spring rains and I went to go take her car to the grocery store and the problem came back, same thing. On a side note, she was in New York City during heavy rains and went through a good sized puddle and the car simply shut off. She waited a few minutes and it started right back up and she was able to drive fine.

My thoughts are the distributor cap or water in the fuel line but I tend to lean more towards the cap and the reason being that if there were water in the gas line wouldn’t it have frozen over the rather brutal winter we had? She had NO signs of this at all this winter and it snowed a lot this year for us up in New England. Any other input would be most helpful, I hope it’s the cap because that I can change out no worries but I don’t want to just throw a cap in there for no reason. I also put new OEM plugs in last year around September or so, so I know those are good and the seal around the plugs is good.

Thanks!