What year/model wagon should I buy?

What are you looking for in a car? Do you want power and handling? The best fuel economy you can get? Do you plan to work on the car yourself? I personally have a particular liking for the 240 and 740 Turbo wagons but those, especially the former are getting a bit long in tooth so finding a real nice one for sale is rare.

For newer stuff, the 850's are generally regarded as good aside from '93 which had a few issues. People like their 960s but they're a bit more complex, the V90 is essentially the same car.

Over the new FWD ones, yes, absolutely. Given the choice between an older RWD model and a Forester, I'd probably take the RWD Volvo (although the Forester does come with a manual tranny and RWD Volvos were auto-only in the US after 1990 or so).

-Andrew

Thankfully that's not too difficult to remedy, after doing a few slushbox to manual conversions I think I could pull it off in a day assuming all the parts were on hand.

Mechanic we use (volvo only, and independent) likes 2. He likes the

1998 model year and the 2000 model year; we haven't discussed anything earlier. Doesn't like much of anything after 2000. Don't know any more details, ie, awd, etc. Since he gets our 2 cars about every 5k miles for routine maint. i trust his judgement. So if I were to buy another one that's what I'd be looking at.

Thanks for all the advice. I found a '96 850 that I'll be taking in for a pre-purchase inspection tomorrow. We'll see how it goes.