Volvo S60 S80 V70 Corroded Starter Wire Engine Will Not Crank or Turn Over

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Hi, everyone. I'm Don from 1AAuto.com. In this series of videos we're going to be focusing on vehicle diagnostics and maintenance tips. We hope that you find it helpful and when you need parts for your car or truck, think of 1AAto.com. Thanks.

In this video, we're going to show you how to diagnosis why your car might not start when you turn the key. This is one of several things that can go bad for you on a S60, S80, V70, Cross Country XC90, model years 2001 through 2007. This is a common issue that I've seen where you turn the key and nothing happens. You think, "Oh, it could be a dead battery." You think, "Oh, it could be a bad starter." It could be those things, but, all in all, there is a wire that goes to your starter solenoid that tells the starter to engage and it just seems to be a common problem with these particular model years in Volvo and models that has that. That wire will corrode or loosen up on the starter solenoid so it's not getting the signal to tell the starter to go ahead and turn on.

Again, I've seen it many, many times where a customer will bring a car into a dealer, when I worked in a dealership, bring a car in and say, "My car won't start." Then . boom! . it starts for us there just because of a little bit of jiggling while it was on the tow truck or whatnot. This is a good thing to check. Even if you don't have the problem or if you do run across this problem, you want to make sure that this is all set. This is what we're going to do now, we're going to show you what the problem is and how to rectify it.

So, let's start by locating the starter and this is Volvo's tried and true 5 cylinder motor. If you have the turbo, you're going to have a turbo pipe that goes here but for the most part this is the way your engine compartment looks and your starter is down here. Your red wire is there. That provides the power to your starter solenoid and this wire is the culprit right here in this black conduit. Now, this can get loose and it can also get corroded. I'm going to pull it off so I can show you. You see how corroded that is. That should really be cleaned up.

Here we've got the connector and if you were to take this into a dealership, what they'd do is they'd cut this connector off and they'd put a pigtail on it with a new connector but that's not always necessary. What I'm going to do is just use a pick tool and just try and get a little bit of that corrosion out of there. You want to make sure that it makes a good solid connection with the tab that's on the back of that starter solenoid. Then once you do that, if you feel like it's just too much play, you can take a pair of pliers, like these, and just crimp down on it.

Once you've got that all cleaned up, you can go ahead and put it back on to your starter solenoid and it can be a little tricky, because it's tight down there. All right so even if you don't have this problem, it's probably not a bad idea to check it, because, of course, you don't want to be stranded someplace. Now you know and that's one possible problem that happens with these vehicles and you'll know how to fix it now.

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