Had an incident with the car last week. Set off early one cold morning and about 5 minutes into my journey I had a sudden loss of power. Not complete loss of power just a sudden reduction. It felt just like the traction control kicking in, which is what I assumed it was, but then the power did not return. In fact I had very little power and a new message on the dash "Engine System Service Required" (or was it Urgent?).
This didn't bode well, and I was obviously in some sort of 'Limp Mode' where the ECU prevents you from using too much torque in case of engine damage due to whatever has been flagged up as faulty. So I pulled over and turned the engine/ignition off, waiting a bit then back on. The message had cleared and it appeared to be normal again, but pretty much straight away it went back into limp mode and I was limited to about 2,000 RPM. So at this point I decided to go back home.
On the way home, I had some odd jerky moments and it even cut out a few times. Made it back home and resolved to look up a local Volvo specialist and see what they could do. There would be no point me having a look as there will be nothing visibly wrong and what could take me ages to trouble shoot, can be done in seconds with the right fault reader.
