Hoping for a quick answer here as I’m trying to help out a young intern at work. She has a 2000 Volvo S40 that is at a dealer right now quoting $415 for a possitive battery cable replacement. Has anyone worked on one of theses cars? I’d think it is a pretty straight forward repair, but a quick goog search didn’t give me much. I’d like to offer my help, but I don’t want to get in over my head with anything…
Thanks, Mike
i would assume the job itself isnt too hard but I bet the cable is expensive/dealer only and cant be bought at pep boys because of the special connections on it
cable from alt to batt??? make your own from 4ga and some terminals for like 10 bucks? getting to the alt could be another story. Did the dealer give any more info on the job?
Is the battery in the trunk or in the engine bay?
cable calls for 1.6 hours.It depends whats wrong.corroded terminal end? pretty sure it a 4 gauge wire. probably can just replace the terminal.
a more important question is , does she swallow?
i dont know what engine she has and such so i couldnt make sure they have the part before i posted that, but that site is great.
Probably a remote mounted battery in the trunk or something. Only reason I could think of for it being so expensive.
Even if it is mounted in the trunk, 4ga at 3 bucks a foot. we all know how expensive the dealer but damn. locating the alt and actually getting to it will be the hard part and or finding out which wire is bad
Dealer told her that the “cable had exploded”. My thoughts were to simply remove the cable, go buy what ever length to replace, new terminals, and be done. However, I’m curious to know a few things:
*exactly how much damage is done to this alleged exploded cable
*is there any other wire nearby that could have also been affected, thus shorting something out somewhere else in the system. I have no problems replacing a cable…I’m just hoping that’s all it is and is an easy fix on these cars.
Car has a new battery, which is mounted under the hood.
Open up the hood… we can’t tell you.
Forgot to ask this…where did you get the 1.6 hour number from?
4ga wire is not exactly an OEM cable with proper terminals, etc. If its 1.5hrs book as someone stated you’re around $125 labor. So the cable is a few hundred bucks. Not that crazy considering there are plenty of crazy prices on OEM parts.
Just go look at it, figure out what you need and replace. /caseclosed
exploded battery cable wtf??? i have heard of melted but never heard of or have seen an exploded cable. not sure what this wire is made of
I’m not asking you to diagnose this problem. I’m looking to see if anyone has worked on these to tell me what the possitive battery cable replacement entails. The car is at a dealership in Amherst and would need to be towed to my house. Rather than give her the 100% go-ahead to drop this at my house, I was hoping for some feedback from someone who’s parhaps dealt with a car like this.
Just found out about this a few hours ago, and I’m at work in EA so opening the hood right now is out of the question.
I’m not going to post what took me 30 seconds of google to figure out. But it is more than you need to know including the price, the common issues, recalls and the ENTIRE FUCKING CABLING ROUTING DIAGRAM.
God people are fucking lazy.
Please post it up…I wasn’t lazy, just didn’t find what I was looking for when I googled. Aren’t we here to help out fellow enthusiats?
I closed it.
I googled “S40 battery cable” or something like that, clicked through 2-3 pages, found a 16MB pdf titled “tp3959202_s40_v40_2002_wiring_diagrams_section_3_39.pdf” among others.
all data
One thing to consider with regards to the cost of replacement is that some cars have a much more complicated “B+ cable” or “positive battery cable”. It’s not necessarily just one cable going from the battery to the starter etc. I have not replaced or dealt with the cables on S40s but I do remember replacing the B+ cables on S70s. These ran from the battery terminal through the body harness and into the engine fuse box. The routing and removal of the old wiring made this a time consuming repair. Is the car at the Volvo dealership in Williamsville?