iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Yeah I can't fault them for wanting to be different. That *is* a good thing. So is upsetting the gammons! But I just can't love the new shape. Maybe I'm just out of touch but there are so few car designs today that really capture me. The Ioniq 5 and the Charger EV are probably my few favourites.

It’s okay for you to take time with this, friend. You’ll know when the time is right.💕

000

Nice Tascam. I miss having a proper portable digital recorder. I love to love recording sounds of car or old tech with it.

200

I loved the advert that all the grumpy idiots called “woke.” It was genuinely fun. But the concept car really didn’t wow me. Neither does the weird corporate typeface. But I also don’t want such a historic name to fail, so I hope it does well for them. Plus it will annoy Farage so that’s good!

I also just realised this is an SPA car! So it’s definitely a bit of a different world to P2. But hey, bonus is your CEM is easier to crack into! I think they’re easier to talk to in general. I never got as far as the SPA cars but I have considered them.

010

Here’s a screengrab from the last drive our XC90 did. Orange triangle of doom and you can make out one of the two dashes where ‘D’ should be. It was a shame as I really liked it. Extremely comfortable and the D5 sounded glorious. A nice looking SUV as well.

2004 Volvo XC90 D5 with orange warning triangle, stuck in emergency 3rd gear.

000

You’ll always know it’s bad in a P2 if you get the message ‘Transmission service required’ and the shift indicator turns into two dashes instead of your selected gear and it locks into the emergency 3rd gear mode.

Not sure if it’s something that can be done in car with software. Again, I never bothered looking into it further once I realised the box was junk on our XC90. When the TCM keeps dropping out, reporting lock up faults and acts like you’re driving over a cattle grid while cruising you know it’s over.

100

The only problem is: I think it was quietly done, only if you asked for it. I don’t believe every car was recalled, and even if it was, I’m sure many just didn’t bother or didn’t know because it’s not uncommon to find them still without the fix.

100

Volvo realised this was causing accelerated wear on the gearbox and offered a firmware patch to stop it doing this, so it behaved like a standard auto and stayed in D. Ironically not every brand that used this gearbox offered this fix, so lots of AW55s died a horrible death (see: Vel Satis)

AW55 in P2 Volvos originally took the car into neutral when you came to a stop even when in D. This was awful because not only does shifting an auto in and out of D constantly at every stop cause so much unnecessary wear, this box then violently slammed back into gear as you pressed the throttle.

If we ever have a safe place to charge ours, I’ll bear that in mind! The state of health display on the listings is a really nice touch, genuinely. Saves the guess work and/or having to plug it into software to check.

020

To be fair flush the fluid first and see what that does. Unless it’s already clean?

You probably will need software to change solenoids but for the fluid change aspect of it if I recall correctly. (I never got that far with my XC90 since the gearbox was genuinely destroyed by abuse and also hadn’t had the neutral drop firmware patch.)

200

I particularly like the fuel gauge you can smash your legs and knees on!

020

This is also why I re-record a lot of pre-recorded albums. They sound so much better after. Unless it's a pre-recorded chrome because they are VERY weird and still used the 120us bias of Type I for compatibility, and use a weird EQ to achieve it. You can't use Type II setting and compensate.

010

Pre-recorded cassettes are IMO also a leading cause of cassette hate. They were mastered at stupidly fast speeds to crank them out, with dirty heads, bad azimuth etc. Then you record your own at realtime and it's like "damn, this is nice" because the sound quality takes such a hit at high speeds.

220

Oh yes this is true. The same reason Dolby Noise Reduction gets a bad rep and I keep telling people "Let me demonstrate my decks with Dolby" and funnily enough it's usually "Wow, that works well!" and it it! Even B, is which is pretty good for 60s tech. It doesn't ruin music when it's done right.

Ironically, I think the later SPA Volvo CEMs are actually much easier to crack, so even Volvo must have gone "damn that was a bit much yo"

010

Oh speaking of CEMs, I bet you love the fact as much as I do about them having a PIN code you need to crack to clone and/or reflash any part of them! Oh and the tool to crack it was pretty pricey! I think VDASH sometimes could, but it depended on the car and revision it was talking to.

200

It's a shame because I think you live far from me. Otherwise I would be very down for bringing my kit to you to have a look! But you might be lucky and this is an example of one that just works!

200

Sure my dad had told me some stories from his time in the trade, but I'd never had a car newer than 1994 up until that point. It was the same with the Rover 75 of course. You could do all that from a computer.

100

The XC90 and then the Rover 75 was what taught me CANBUS has more control than it really ought to. Sitting in the XC90 turning on and off interior lights that weren't responding to the light's switch, and operating windows from a click of a trackpad was like WOAH.

200

So it's also possible some codes are phantom ones. Without using VIDA or VDASH, it can be a bit of a shot in the dark as to whether you're seeing the full picture.

It can be a bit of a mixed bag with generic readers because they make a lot of assumptions. I use an old Delphi Autocom for example, and it used to give me error codes about the diesel fuel preheater when we had the XC90 (it didn't have one, and VIDA recognised this)

200

Yep! The worst one is brand snobbery. My GOSH is it such a cancer in the audio community. People turn down and berate those with certain brands because a graph told them it was bad, whereas the rest of us enjoy those brands because we know the human ear can't hear the frequencies on said graph...

020

Oh and of course not specific to Volvo! That's just one example I'm very familiar with. Many cars by the late 90s were just such a mess of CANBUS. Yes, because my INDICATOR STALK needs to talk IN DEPTH to my body control module, doesn't it PEUGEOT?

I do wish cars were not this complicated. It was a disease that started in the 80s, ramped up by the 90s and exploded in the 2000s. Much of it is very needless, but remarkably it's STILL 1/5th of what people face with a car made today. This is why i have old cars. I need to be able to fix it myself.

This means nice cars end up being chucked because a garage would charge a fortune to go through all this, and many folks don't have old laptops to run VIDA or VDASH on. Or even the patience to set it up (and believe me, with VIDA you need it.) I'm lucky I've been a techie for years like yourself.

Well yeah, because the data line for it goes through the alarm module! This all sucks because it means fixing a P2 car requires a lot of technical knowledge when things need replacing. Though it is easier than it used to be. But I really wished they hadn't done parts pairing.

It's especially important to keep them happy on P2 cars because Volvo interconnected a crap load of stuff together. Like the fact on the XC90 we had, a dead alarm module disables the sunroof control/upper control module. Makes sense, right? 😂

310

I bet the answer is loads! The computers in CANBUS cars go berserk when they hit low voltage states. I've seen all sorts of strange things like lock cycling, wipers being unstoppable, odd light behaviour. (Usually) clearing it all makes it happy. Unless it has the real sads...

100

Yep, the format is severely limited in what it can do! But really, it was a format that lived far too long if you ask me. It was such ancient tech by even the 70s, really. We had astounding sound quality on tape by then. I suspect the answer was "cheap" which is ironic because vinyl ain't that now!

100

And then ALAC makes my flash modded iPod happy so I get to enjoy all that niceness with a nugget on the go!

000

In fact to add to this, I often hunt down the really well mastered CD releases because it's literally one of the highest quality volume produced physical format ever made. CD is great when done right. I love it, and many have been my source material for my tapes ripped into iTunes with ALAC.

But damn this looks like a nice deck. DD with an AT cart. I'm pretty sure I've heard great things about Optonica.

The only reason vinyl used to have an edge on CD is because CD masters sucked when they were in the height of the loudness war, and everybody cranked the levels into clipping. Because a well mastered CD is flipping AMAZING and the format as a whole was so underrated for that. Not a bad feat for '82.

210

LOL, it really isn't! Don't even start me on inner groove distortion argument. But that's the "warmth" they love so much. A well-recorded cassette sounds far superior to my ears.

Vinyl is very much a hobby I tend to dip in and out of because it is fiddly. Even with my fairly high midrange setup. Plus it's full of incredibly misinformed "audiophiles" who think vinyl is the highest quality format to listen to music...

320

Records are annoying to get right. A good record brush helps but if they're worn or deeply dirty, it takes AGES to get it down to a level where you can't hear it, unless you get one of those expensive cleaning machines.

100

That doesn't look like a setup that should be crap. AT carts are apparently very good. But I don't disagree with the crack and pop aspect. It's the reason I use uncompressed digital masters for my tape recording (like a studio did decades anyway...)

100

I've got access to Volvo VIDA so more than happy to go hunting for part numbers and diagrams if needed! 🙂

120

Plus, the purchase price of an EV (even an older Leaf or something) is too high for our budget currently. We don’t have £3k to just go throwing around! Let alone £10-30k!!

230

Chloe Phillips @vhschloe.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Yes this is the correct take. I like EVs too, but it is ignorant for the drivers of them to be telling us folk we’re idiots for having ICE vehicles when it’s so much cheaper to charge at home. I literally can’t do that in our car park and work aren’t gonna fit a a charger for us.

140

We have a Ryobi one (because all my tools are) and it works really well. We run it off a 40L aqua roll (because we’re caravanners of course!) and it can clean two or sometimes more cars pretty well! A great way to beat the hosepipe ban.

120

Chloe Phillips @vhschloe.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

It basically is the French Donkey van! Though I reckon Berlingo panels are probably a bit thinner than a Mitsubishi Express! Also I’d be FAR too worried about breaking the rear axle doing this. It’s a common weak point on Berlingos! Touch wood this one is currently happy.