What Does It Cost to Maintain a Volvo?

What does it cost to maintain a Volvo? For an S80, like my wife owns, the popular website Repair Pal estimates the figure at $705 annually. Naturally, that comes with the standard caveat that actual results will depend on the age of your car, it’s mileage, your location, and which shop you use.

We’ve owned Patti’s 2008 S80 T6 for nearly 10 years now, so I decided to look back and see what our actual maintenance costs have been over that time, excluding the replacement of tires. We purchased it as a certified pre-owned model in December 2010. It had sat on the dealer’s lot for about a year, then was pressed into service as a loaner vehicle before we bought it with about 18,000 miles on the odometer. (Yes, Volvo’s free loaner program worked its magic on us. She had brought the car home as a loaner earlier in 2010 and remarked that it was a car she’d like to drive. I called our dealership when they put it up for sale around the end of November, and arranged to buy it as a Christmas surprise for her.)

Since we still have six months to go in 2020, let’s start by looking at what we spent over the first nine years of ownership. The grand total comes to $7,800.25, or about $866 per year. That’s not too far off from the Repair Pal estimate, especially when you consider that our figure includes annual Pennsylvania state inspections and annual emissions inspections, at a cost of about $75 combined each time. We also have a spare set of winter tires for the S80 mounted on their own wheels, and for the past several years we have kept the set we’re not using in storage at the dealership. Then, each spring and fall, we have the dealer remove the set that’s on the vehicle and install the set appropriate for the upcoming season. For a while, we weren’t charged for this—especially if the switchover was done when the vehicle was being serviced anyway. More recently, we’ve had to pay for the service, which on our last visit cost us $50, including balancing of the tires being installed. Anyway, subtract the cost of inspections and wheel swaps, and we’re almost perfectly in line with the Repair Pal estimate.

But … and this is fairly significant … our costs would have been significantly higher if Patti’s car hadn’t been purchased under Volvo’s CPO program, which at the time provided coverage for the first 100,000 miles of driving or the first seven years of ownership starting from the date the car was placed in service. In May 2015, with 73,054 miles on the odometer, we needed to replace the rear differential. Had we bought the car new in December 2010, our four-year new-car warranty would have been expired. But with our CPO warranty, that repair was still covered by Volvo, and we didn’t pay a nickel for it. Good thing, too. Our service manager told us the retail price for that repair at his dealership would have been about $7,000.

That certainly represents the costliest repair made on this vehicle to date. Another major item covered under warranty was replacement of the air conditioning compressor at just 30,705 miles.

Only twice so far have we had any single repair bill that we actually had to pay exceed $1,000. The first was that May 2015 visit, which in addition to the rear differential included the standard 75,000-mile service, replacement of a vacuum pump seal, and front and rear brake pads. The other was in August 2018 at 106,701 miles, when the service ticket included a 105,000-mile service, front rotors, wiper blades, a four-wheel alignment, rotating the tires, and balancing the two tires mounted on the front of the car.

Today the S80 has just over 121,000 miles on it, and if you count the last service we had done on May 21 of this year total maintenance costs now stand at $8,530.63, or $853 per year. That assumes we incur no more costs between now and the end of December, and with the little driving we’re doing amid the COVID-19 crisis, I’m hoping there are none.

Costs have gone up a bit in the last 4.5 years of ownership versus the first five. During the first five, our average annual cost was $762.01, and during the last five (well, 4.5), the average annual cost has been $944. I guess that’s to be expected as more parts age.

Overall, I’m reasonably satisfied. By way of comparison, let’s look at the maintenance costs (excluding tires) for my 2003 GMC Yukon XL Denali, which I owned from new for 16 years and drove approximately 185,000 miles.

I’ve always assumed that maintaining a Volvo would be more expensive than maintaining a domestic vehicle, and my numbers seem to bear that out. But the difference isn’t as dramatic as I imagined it would be.

For the entire 16 years of owning the Denali, from 2003 through 2017, I spent $17,024.59 having it serviced and maintained, or $1,064.04 per year. That’s more than the S80 has averaged, but to be fair, virtually all of the added costs for the Denali came during the final years of ownership, when maintenance costs started to skyrocket.

During the first five years of ownership (2003-07), maintenance costs totaled $3,118, or an average of $623.60 per year. During the second five years (2007-11), total costs were even less: $2,901.10, or an average of $580.22 per year. During the third five years (2012-16), costs nearly tripled to a total of $7,648.50, or an average of $1,529.70 per year. During the last two years of ownership (2016 and 2017), maintenance costs totaled $6,393.86, or an average of $3,196.93 per year.

Bear in mind that nearly all maintenance on Patti’s Volvo (save a state inspection here or there) was done by our local Volvo dealership. With the Denali, I’d estimate approximately 75% of the work was done by a GMC dealer, and 25% by a local, independent garage.

Looking over all these numbers, I see two key takeaways:

(1) Absent a catastrophically expensive repair like replacing a rear differential, maintaining a Volvo will almost certainly be more expensive than maintaining a domestic vehicle, but not exorbitantly so.

(2) You can drive today’s cars for a long time before the maintenance costs become irrationally high. Even in the last two years of owning our Denali, when we were spending an average of $3,196.93 per year to maintain the Denali, we were spending the equivalent of $266 per month. But we had no car payment. By contrast, spending $62,000 on a new SUV at that time (roughly what my new XC90 cost) would leave you with a monthly payment of $1,124, assuming no money down and a 5-year loan charging interest at 3.5%. That’s an extra $858 a month versus what maintenance on my old Denali was costing at that point for service.

Sure, the new vehicle would look and smell better, be more gas efficient, and offer many new safety features. Presumably, it wouldn’t need to be going into the shop as often. And yes, over time, it’s likely the maintenance costs on the old Denali would only have increased. (I know, for example, that the rear self-leveling shocks on the Denali were shot.) Still, the cost difference was nothing to sneeze at.

One nice thing about the new XC90 I bought to replace my Denali is that the first three years of maintenance are complimentary. Combine that with everything being under warranty, and total maintenance costs for the first three years will be next to nothing.

Patti’s S80 in 2010