This was a great flatland car, and decent on the highway too. HOWEVER when I drove it up from Florida to the foothills of the Smokies, it started giving me issues. Everything was fine until one night I was driving up Lookout Mountain and, while still in automatic (not downshifting or shifting manually at all), it started lurching and struggling so bad I thought the transmission had fully gone out. I managed to get to a parking lot and called a towing and mechanic shop. They, later, couldn't find ANYTHING wrong with the transmission. There were never any dash lights, no engine overheating, and it never did the problem on flat ground for them. I was relieved I didn't have to rebuild my transmission, but they did find that my catalytic converter was completely blocked and replaced that, along with a spark plug. Great! Hopefully that would do the trick.

NOPE.

When I drove it back up the mountain from the shop, it did it again. I managed to get it back to my place by not going past second gear, because it was around that shift that it would violently hiccup again.

Long story short, I took it to a bunch of different shops, specialists, etc., and ended up at our Volvo dealer. Nobody could find anything wrong with it that would cause it. Every time I drove it up the mountain, it would hiccup and be unpredictable in accelerating. One time it got stuck in second and I couldn't go faster than 20mph, and it wouldn't even rev above 2000rpm?? I tried driving it as a manual, with my mechanic's go-ahead, but that didn't help. It almost always started balking at the same exact place on the mountain, and I started having panic attacks as I approached that spot.

My stepdad's eventual diagnosis was that it was overheating, and that there was nothing I could do about it. So I ended up taking it back to Florida and selling it to people who were staying local. I'm sure it's being great for them, but living on a mountain was not the move. I won't ever trust a Volvo on an incline, that's for sure.