My daughter was on her way to work two weeks ago in her 2000 S80 and had a "catastrophic failure" of the left front ball joint. Thank God no one else was around her and she was going only 40 mph--not yet on the freeway she was headed to. We have had the car 2 1/2 yrs and it has 63,000 miles on it. We do all scheduled maintenance and she says there was absolutely no warning! I'm writing Volvo USA, but we have lost our confidence in this car (in Volvo?). The ball joints had been replaced when the car was a year old I found out, because of a campaign to replace them. Well, the new ones aren't working any better apparently! Shannon
Ball joint failure can happen with any car. Often there is warning in the form of dodginess on rough surfaces like railroad tracks and poor roads, but other times (especially low mileage failures) there really is no warning. Since Volvo probably doesn't make the ball joints, but buys them from a vendor, the problem undoubtedly exists in other anonymous makes. Ball joint failure happened to one of the gurus in the alt.autos.honda forum: http://tegger.com/hondafaq/lowerballjoint/index.html Mike
Ball joint failure at 63,000 miles is certainly NOT common, particularly after the vehicle has already had a dealer installed replacement previously. I wonder how many miles were on Tegger's Honda before it's failure? John
Maybe I should ask him - I am sure it was plenty of miles. I see the Integra has about 270K miles (433K km) on it now http://tegger.com/hondafaq/misc/mileage.jpg Like you say, ball joint failure at 63K miles is very unusual. Mike
Ball joint wear is proportional to to the surface condition of the roads the car is driven on. Poorly maintained city street driving or high speed country road driving will accelerate all suspension component wear. If your mechanic hasn't been checking the suspension bits at every service interval.... Bob
My daughter was on her way to work two weeks ago in her 2000 S80 and Get it to the local Volvo dealer for them to have a look. Lets hear what they say, before we jump to conclusions. Niels
