There is no use crying over spilt sweet tea or soda pop in your Volvo.

Unless off-course you spilt the Sugary drink on the automatic gear shift lever mechanism. This will cost you $700 to get it fixed. You can now start crying.

Like you, I like the convenience of having a cup holder in the center console of my car. But the sweet stuff is not only toxic to the human body, but is also toxic to the lubricant in the shifter interlock mechanism.

Diet coke is just as bad. Don’t even think it!

Last week, a sweet African lady called us when the shifter lever on on her 2002 S60 got stuck. She was unable to move the shifter to drive, she could only pull back the shifter into reverse.

The reason why the shifter was not working properly was because the shifter interlock mechanism was gummed up with a sticky substance. Someone  spilled a sugary drink on the shifter mechanism. The sweet stuff slowly ran down the lever, eventually mixing up with the lubricant in the interlock mechanism. The mixture formed into a sweet sticky substance that gummed up the shifter.

This glue like substance is thicker in the morning when the temperatures are low. However, as the day warms up and temperatures start to rise, the shifter loosens up, just a little bit. This is because the sickly substance becomes less viscous and starts to flow.

What you should do today

To prevent this sticky substance from ever forming you have to do three things:

  1. Buy some Simple Green All-purpose Cleaner from the Volvo Parts department — $7.99
  2. Use Simple Green to clean the spilt sweet drink off the Shifter Mechanism.
  3. Even better, don’t eat or drink in your car and prevent mice and sticky substances — ewww, how gross!

As Benjamin Franklin famously said it: An once of prevention is worth a pound of cure. For it is better to try to avoid problems in the first place, rather than trying to fix them once they arise.

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