Volvo V50 - opinions?

While i'm here, anyone had/got/experience of a Volve V50.

I've been looking at a 2012 1.6 Diesel DrivE, up to 80mpg, free road tax. I've driven it and it was pleasant enough if a bit lacklustre (but we have a Leon FR for when I need a giggle).

From what I can gather it is a Focus with a different lid on. I can't decide whether that should put me off or not.

Any opinions appreciated.

Reply to
R D S
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Well of course, I currently drive a 12 year old Passat estate!

Reply to
R D S

Up to 80MPG. So they promise you'll never do any better?

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Andy

Reply to
Vir Campestris

Ummm............ Has it got a DPF Guv? Would you drive it on the motorway everyday at 70mph? Or Do you pop along to the shops and potter about 5 miles here 5 miles there?

DPF not a good idea with daily short journeys. BTDTBTTS .....

Reply to
Kellerman

Perhaps. My wife uses our Fiesta for shopping and other short distance journeys.

This is 1.6 Duratorq +DPF TDCi (Ford Peugeot collaboration?)

I drive for any journey likely to involve motorways. Occasionally I am aware that the performance is not as expected although there is no dashboard indication to say cleaning is occurring. One point... the engine management system seems to stay in that mode until the engine is stopped and re-started.

Don't expect engine cabin heat within the first 5 miles:-(

Reply to
Tim Lamb

Anyone who believes such claims deserves everything they get. ;-)

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

To what degree is the dash readout to be believed? I have been meaning to test it for some time.

I can get (or can I?) 50+ in both our 1.9 Passat and 2.0 Leon is the right (but very rare) confditions.

Reply to
R D S

IME of mainly German cars, pretty accurate.

Reply to
RJH

I have no reason to doubt the Fiesta fuel consumption reading. Rarely exceeds 65mpg and more likely mid 50's over a long averaging period.

Reply to
Tim Lamb

Very accurate on both my cars. Just as good as filling the tank several times and working out the overall MPG.

Yehbut, it was the 'up to 80mpg' bit I was having a laugh at.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Missus has a V40, and the dashboard indicator fluctuates, as you'd expect, from about 20 to about 90. Perhaps this is what they mean by 'up to'?

Reply to
Dan S. MacAbre

In my Mondeo, If I have a nearly full tank, and have been doing short local runs, I rather like watching the range calculation - I can go for a long run and arrive home with more range than I set off with.

Chris

Reply to
Chris J Dixon

I got over 55mpg out of a Triumph spifire once.

Had to drive from Surrey to Cambridgeshire with 4" of snow on the ground.

Talk about 'gentle right foot' and 'staying below 50mph'

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Many 'instant' reading OBCs will show very high MPG when going down a hill etc. But claiming that as the MPG might be ok if it also showed a negative figure when idling in a traffic jam. ;-)

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

I got over 55mph out of a BSA 250cc motorbike once. The bloke who sold it to me, back in 1966 showed me his speeding summons as proof that it could do 67mph but I never managed to get it to go that fast.

Nick

Reply to
Nick Odell

Even more so with very little fuel left. On a cold start it will show the range left based on the fuel consumption at that point in time. As the engine heats up and uses less fuel, the range will go up.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

I had a few mates with C15s, and one with a Starfire. I had a Tiger Cub. You'd just put 50p worth of petrol in the tank every now and again. Used to slosh the bike from side-to-side to check the petrol level.

Reply to
Dan S. MacAbre

TBH, when the thing is cruising, the fuel economy seems impressive. OTOH, I guess that's true for anything. As a car, though, all the safety features are a bit confusing. It has a few cameras in the windscreen, and I suppose the technology could be described as impressive; but in practice the beeps as you approach cyclists, and when you try to park the thing just become annoying and distracting. And having the engine stop at traffic lights seems just silly, since the wear on the starter and battery is going to be out of all proportion. I know you can switch all these things off, and one day I'll get the manual out and go for it. Other than all that, what more can you say, other than 'it gets you from A to B'?

Reply to
Dan S. MacAbre

Not that hard to get anything you want BHP wise by just increasing the amount of 'blow'. Not convinced it gives as good a result as a larger engine, though. Just a cheaper way of doing it.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Way back in my youth, early 70s, a lot of my biker mates had BSA 250cc SS80s, supposedly the tuned up sportster version of (iirc) the C15 which I could both out accelerate and outpace with my 250 Matchless CSR even with a pillion passenger on board.

They used to point out the larger diameter rear wheel sprocket as the reason for leaving them standing until I asked them how it could explain the better top end - that shut them up! :-)

It was a bike I'd built from a kit of parts bought off another mate for the princely sum of 15 quid around 1970 on account its previous owner made the mistake of having the engine repaired by a local motorbike emporium in Liverpool which we nicknamed "Dewhursts" on account of their 'butchered' repairs. In this case, the engine had seized whilst said luckless owner was riding it home from "Dewhurst's workshop. I guess He'd had enough when he sold it to our mutual friend 'for scrap'.

Knowing that there was a lubrication issue to be sorted out, when I assembled the bike, I left the integral oil tank cover off (it was a dry sump engine, the tank just happened to integrated) so, by leaving it tilted over, I could check whether the two hundred or so millilitres of oil was being sucked up when turning the engine over via the back wheel. When I did this test, bubbles of air were being forced into the tank with forward rotation. Reverse rotation caused oil to be drawn up but it didn't seem to be getting everywhere it was supposed to be going.

The oil pump on this engine is driven via worm gear from the crankshaft which causes it to rotate against a cam peg in an annular wavy groove making it reciprocate along its axis of rotation, covering and uncovering ports appropriately to make it pump via a couple of delivery galleries (one for the bottom end, the other for the top end of the engine - in this case via a gallery drilled into the piston barrel matching the one in the cylinder head relying on the integrity of the base gasket to stop the oil leaking out which, in the absence of a pressure relief valve, meant that the first time you topped 45 or 50 mph after an oiltight re- build lead to it acquiring the nickname "The Torrey Canyon" - it looked worse than it really was - at least I didn't have to worry about anything astern of the engine suffering from rust problems).

Rather bemused by this finding, I had my dad drive me to another local bike emporium (my left foot was still in plaster cast after writing off an Austin Maxi with my D14 Bantam a few weeks earlier) after telephoning to check whether they had a spare pump plunger. Said pump plunger had been taken out of another 250cc Matchless/AJS which had been, literally, broken up for spares.

In this case, they'd separated the crankcase halves the hard way by snapping the crankshaft pin, forgetting the need to undo the end plug on the pump so as to remove said pump plunger to release the crankshaft from that crankcase half. As a result, the splines on the pump plunger weren't in the best of condition but my need to solve the oiling riddle meant I bought it anyway.

This replacement pump plunger fixed the problem experienced by the previous owner but it was to have consequences several thousand miles later when the splines finally gave up the ghost. It seems "Dewhursts" must have used an oil pump plunger from another AJS/Matchless model using a similar but not identical oil pumping technique. It's just unfortunate that the parts happened to be physically interchangeable despite the critical differences in porting.

Long before the oil pump failed again, the crankpin snapped so I had a word with my 'supplier' who was able to oblige me with a CSR 250 Matchless engine with broken front mounting lugs from which I could extract the crankshaft and other relevant parts. For some reason, now forgotten in the dim mists of time, he also supplied me with most of a

350cc Matchless single which led to my stripping down both bikes and the engines and gearboxes for me to cherry pick the best combination of parts to put into the original 250cc AJS frame.

What I unwittingly landed up with from that combination was effectively a Matchless 250cc CSR spec machine (clutch, gearbox, the 17 inch rear wheel and 30mm Amal Monoblock carburettor from the 350cc assemblage, the CSR crankshaft from the damaged 250cc engine and doubtless a few other bits and pieces).

The curious thing with my rebuilds was that every time I replaced the clutch with one using stronger springs, the clutch action got lighter, culminating in the heaviest clutch donated by that 350cc machine resulting in the easiest to operate clutch lever.

Somewhere along the way, I got hold of a couple of Chronometric speedometer heads one of which I used to replace the crappy utility spinning magnet and ali disk affair the bike had originally been cursed with. I was able to recalibrate my speedo (clip on balance weights in the clockwork based Chronometric speedo) with timed runs past the quarter mile markings that had been placed on a local quiet stretch of road, apparently for use by the traffic cops to check their own speedos.

I mention the *calibrated* Chronometric speedo for context in my claim for the bike's top end speed of 82mph, a figure nicely in excess of those rubbish quality SS80s. This might sound 'snobbish' on my part but, just as my dad had claimed - he was a marine engineer by profession- the difference between BSA and Triumph Motorcycles was BSA's use of inferior quality materials in place of the much higher quality materials being used by Triumph.

Whenever BSA's attempts at offering extra performance backfired in the form of, for example, broken crank pins on their Bantam D14s with its

10:1 compression cylinder head, their solution was to detune rather than beef up (replacement cylinder heads for their D14 were reconfigured for a 9.5:1 compression ratio). This detuning of later versions of all their 'high performance' models that consequently suffered poor reliability was, almost without exception, their 'Go To' solution to 'Fix The Problem'.

Apologies for such a long and rambling post but your experience of that BSA 250cc (presumably a C15)'s rather pathetic 55mph top end brought back a flood of fond memories of my biking days which I thought would be of some interest in spite of the slightly off-topic drift.

However, to at least get back on topic regarding fuel economy, I would like to mention that that 250cc Matchless CSR averaged 90mpg and I wasn't a fuel economy conscious rider. Knowing what I now know from my subsequent tuning experiences with a T120V, I think I could probably have improved that to anywhere from 120mpg to 150mpg without loss of performance - the idle mixture was *so* rich that even on a cold morning, I could start it up with the first kick, no choke and no throttle *then* turn on the fuel tap! Adjusting the idle mixture on the T120V had been enough just by itself to raise the fuel economy from a pathetic 50mpg to a more reasonable 75mpg.

The 100mpg performance came later, courtesy of a homebrewed twin coil CDI unit and some clever fettling of the Amal Concentric carburettors (no doubt helped by pinching closed the rubber balance tube that joined the inlet ports to both improve idling carburation efficiency and quieten the tick-over by eliminating the inevitable lumpiness caused by this 'balance pipe' feature).

Reply to
Johnny B Good

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