Yannis,

Well written reply...

Something you may want to keep in mind though is the "vicious cycle" that you are unfortunatly a part of. You sell a car and its a nightmare. Volvo fails to respond and a customer gets away feeling cheated. They never walk into your dealership again for the oppurtunity for a new sale. They tell their friends. Their freinds never go to your dealership because of their friends experiences with your one "bad apple" on the lot.

Volvo is no different than any other car maker. Everyone can produce a bad car. Jaguar in the early 80's is a prime example. I have several friends that owned Jag's in the early 80's and went back to the dealership for another one every time. The difference is the level of service and respect they were given at the Jaguar dealerships. When Jaguar said they were going to do someting they did it. When something broke that was their fault they fixed it and compensated the owner. While having never owned a troublesome early 80's Jag I can tell you my experience with the Volvo dealerships. From having to bring my car in MULTIPLE times for the same simple issue that they are too cheap to order parts to replace to having someone promise me follow up and then not returning my calls when I start calling for them Volvo has always "run away" from problems rather than dealing with them upfront and immediatly.

A friend of mine is a Physician and purchased a C70 HPT convertible from Volvo with every option on it. He was 30 at the time. Here you have a 30 year old Dr. purchasing your top of the line car with every concevable option on it. Naturally you want his future business due to the fact that he is going to be buying a LOT more even higher end cars in the future. You want that repeat business. Eventually he became fustrated with the problems and fustrated with the extremely poor customer service he was getting through Volvo. They did not seem to care that he bought their most expensive car. They did not care that he was a 30 year old physician that was going to probably trade this car in on another one just like it the second it ran out of warranty. They did not care about him, his inability to get to his practice while he was at the dealership nor his future business. He eventually hired an attorney and after lots of fighting Volvo agreed to swap the car out for another one. Do you think he will walk into another Volvo dealership when its time again for a new Vehicle? Ill tell you the answer. Its NO. In fact probably HELL NO just like my reply.

Volvo needs to come to the realization that angry customers like my friend and myself don't ever go away. We harbor our hatred for the company that mistreated us for a very long time. Well after our cars die and are in the junk yard we will be telling people considering any kind of Volvo product about our problems with the company and their products.

Lexus and BMW realize this and go to great lengths to please even unreasonable customers (my cupholder broke I want blah blah blah blah for free ). This pays off for them in the long run. They sell more cars and have more chances for that "great car" to sell more and more of their make.

Before buying my Volvo I bought Honda after Honda after Honda. They were simple cars but they were EXTREMELY reliable and had great resale value. A Prelude that I had kept around crept up to 211,000 miles and was simply amazing in performance. Everything still worked and other than normal wear and tear items like brake pads and a clutch it was trouble free. Anyone who commented about my car got an earful on how wonderful it was. I planned on keeping that paticular car around forever until it got involved in an accident.

Even though I will probably never buy another Honda again (I have simply out grown them) I will always have great things to say about their cars. Even though I will definatly never buy another Volvo again I will always have bad things to say about their cars and their poor customer service.