[Neil France]

Hello all

I'm a Brit living in France, having brought my 2011 Volvo V50 from the UK. It has the D4162T engine with approximately 126K miles.

A couple of years back, the local garage persuaded me that the "Engine performance reduced" message we were occasionally getting had nothing to do with the particulate filter being full, resulting in a very expensive turbo change plus 4 x injector change.

These problems were finally brought under control by our local Volvo dealer, in that the particulate filter was changed, performance reduced message disappeared, fuel consumption back to normal. However, what remained was the smell of exhaust at idle, i.e. with the car, engine running, but stationary.

On a trip to the UK, another Volvo garage diagnosed the smell as coming from a loose/compromised seal on a resonator pipe - this was replaced but failed to cure the issue.

The car was taken back to Volvo here in France, where they diagnosed the problem as coming from badly installed injectors and recommended re-seating the injectors using new seals as well as replacing the small diameter pipes that feed diesel to the injectors. I apologize for my layman's vocabulary - I'm not a mechanic or someone who tinkers with cars.

When they started this work, the foreman called to say that the garage who installed the new injectors (not Volvo, but a "specialist" diesel garage) had installed them so tightly that they'd broken the "rims" - this is a translation from the French, but I'm guessing they mean the lip of the injector support - I've attached photos.

The job has just been completed and I went to pick up the car at the beginning of this week. No smell - great. However, in the higher gears (say 5th and 6th) if one lets the revs get too low (but before the dashboard indicator appears that advises a gear shift) there's a noticeable vibration. To me, again as a layman, it's almost as though the engine is running on 3 rather than 4 cylinders - a bit of an exaggeration, but hopefully you'll know what I mean.

Immediately returned to the workshop and the foreman came back out on the road with me and suggested that, now that the fuel delivery system was completely pressure-tight, it was likely that the vibration was simply due to low revs and the necessity for a gear shift - i.e. just change gear earlier and don't let the revs drop too low.

After one day, took the car back to Volvo and asked them to fix it as, in my opinion, there was something wrong. They've had it four days now and have just called to say they can find nothing wrong - no faults show up on the diagnostics and they say they even changed the injectors from a similar car and had the same result.


I've attached cropped images of the invoices for the work done - I'm assuming, probably naively, that Volvo part numbers in France are the same as Volvo part numbers everywhere else.

Does anyone have any ideas?