You might want to drop Rick a note, as he’s a retired Volvo guy, and could probably give you all the pointers you’d ever want about the car.
At one time, Chevy was claiming that they were going to be building the Volt with an engine that could be easily swapped out (so if you buy a gasser and diesel or bio-diesel suddenly becomes the better fuel, you can just get a new engine, instead of a new car). Of course, that was before GM unveiled the bar of soap that’s to be the Volt, so I’ve no idea if they’ve kept that part of the design or not.
The guy who bought Dad’s old 740 new got it from Sweden, through what was then called their “Tourist and Diplomat Service” or some such thing. At the time it must have been a nicely equipped car for the money, by the time Dad came by it, it was merely comfortable and had a nice key fob
Your then-husband never had to work on an ST185 Toyota Celica AllTrac.
And as much as I curse this car for working on (and breaking every five minutes at $1000 a pop), the worst experience I ever had working on a car was a Mini Cooper S which needed the lower A arm replaced. The bushing it was supposed to slide into was bolted onto the unibody from the top. Which means one would have had to remove the engine to get at the bolts.
We ended up using half a can of silicone lube, two jacks, a 2x4, and 14 hours to get it back in.
When I worked for Honda we did tool layouts for every serviceable part. If you designed something with a bolt on it, you had to demonstrate that the bolt could be removed with a standard wrench, or else the chief engineer wouldn’t sign off on the drawing. It only makes sense, really - if a part is hard to remove and replace, then there’s a good chance it’ll be hard to assemble in the first place. Hard to assemble means costly and prone to mistakes, which means wasted time and money.
