GREENSBORO, N.C. — We’ve heard our share of complaints from Volvo owners about some of the EPA-’07-configured trucks, so we felt compelled to ask Volvo about the status of those concerns.

Bill Dawson, Volvo’s senior vice-president of customer satisfaction came clean and acknowledged the troubles, and explained what steps they’ve take to resolve them.

“We had issues with our ’07-configured product, we are very much aware of them. We had more issues than we would have liked,” he said. “Since the 2007 engine is the base technology for 2010, we knew we had to get this right, so we’ve worked aggressively to resolve them."

Volvo now uses a more robust flex-pipe between the turbo and the DPF that came out last fall. And the turbo problem has been resolved by inserting a “fay” ring in the turbo that prevents the leakage from the high-pressure side of the turbine to the low side. That was causing extreme turbulence and damaging turbine vanes.

“We’ve installed thousands of turbochargers now with the new part and we’ve seen only three come back. I think that issue is now behind us,” Dawson says.

Modifications have been made to the injectors, solving the cup problems, and Dawson says the issues with the so-called seventh injector have disappeared since an air purge valve was installed.

“But in 2010, we won’t be seeing any active [fuel-fired] regens, so that becomes an non-issue going forward,” he notes.

— For a full report on some of these and other improvements check out our weekly online feature of on the 2010 VN780 (click here).