The fuel gauge in a car I'm working on always seems to read 1/8 of a tank, regardless of how much gas is in it. The gauge itself seems to be OK as I've swapped instrument clusters and observed the same thing on both. Before I tear into the gas tank to replace the sender, is there anything else worth checking? Any diagnostic tips would be appreciated. Thanks!

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Matt L. -- Cary, NC -- '91 740 wagon

The fuel level sender in the larger 73 litre tanks found in the later '94 & '95 940's (and likely many 960's) is a different design from the earlier units and has been known to give this type of failure. The contacts wear out internally and the float gets stuck. Because your gauge reads between zero and full, my bet is on the sender as you suspect. There is one diagnostic you can try. Open the access cover to the fuel pickup assembly and give it a few solid taps. If the gauge moves toward the actual fuel level then that's definitely the problem. Even if it doesn't move, you could still have a sender problem if the float is totally stuck in the coils in which case you should have had early warning symptoms such as the gauge being sort of "sticky" after a fill-up until you drove over a few bumps. In that case I'd want to do some basic electrical diagnosis before diving into the tank. I believe you'll find my experience with this documented in the 700/900 FAQ feature section. The only correction to the FAQ article is that the sender is apparently available from Volvo as a separate part from the fuel pickup assembly. I hope you've got a wagon rather than a sedan -there's more head room to work through the access cover. For a sedan you may want to consider dropping the tank to access the pickup assembly.
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Dave -not to be confused with a real expert

We just replaced the fuel sender on our 95 964. My wife has smaller hands and was able to get in the truck and snake the old sender out and the new on in. It isn't fun, but it's not too terribly difficult either, just a bit of a pain.

DEWFPO
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1998 S90 071,245 and 1995 964 154,100