^^ Yeah. As I am sure you know, like other subjects on the internet, most of the vitriol against the D24 and its relatives comes in the form of hearsay and rumor and urban legend..... and almost all from people who have never even seen a D24 powered car with their own eyes, let alone driven, owned, or turned a wrench on one. Third, fourth, or fifth-hand stories, about a buddy whose sister's boyfriend's uncle owned one 30-plus years ago and what a POS they heard it was, how the camshaft just decided one morning to shatter into five pieces or something.....
So many of them were killed by careless mechanics and owners early on. The Volvo dealers and indie garages resented the idea of a non-Volvo engine under the hood (or really anything other than a 4-banger redblock, as the PRV Volvo engines suffered a similar attitude). They never wanted to really understand how the engine worked, or to get the special tools and knowledge to service them correctly. My sense is that the vast majority of those cars were running around all the time with the cam and pump timing way off and the crank bolt not fully torqued, from hacks (often also dealers) cutting corners on timing belt jobs. I owned many D24T 740s that came with stacks of service records ..... A constant theme was always something about how the car, having been trouble-free up to that point, would go in for its first timing belt job at around 75k miles, or for some kind of warranty work on the fuel system, and starting from then onward it was never right again, always complaints about hard starting, lack of power, overheating, smoke..... Classic timing symptoms on an old mechanical motor.... Attempt after attempt to "diagnose" and fix it by folks lacking the timing tools, eventually adding up to thousands or sometimes literally TENS of thousands of dollars over the years while the owner lived with a car that never ran correctly despite repeatedly rebuilding the injection pump and injectors, over and over and over again, LOL .... Then the car ends up being thought of as a lemon of course, "unfixable". Or, one day the crank bolt that was installed wrong loosens up and the timing gear spins, breaks the camshaft.... Hence reputation of cam trouble. Almost everything that went wrong with these engines was sabotage. The same of course was often true with TDIs that failed in the hands of hack mechanics playing with the timing system, but in that case for some reason nobody seems to blame the design of the motor.
Of course the Volvo owners didn't help much either, being used to the redblock motor and being told the diesel would be "even cheaper" to own since no tuneups needed. Folks bought Volvos back then because they wanted something they could fix only after it broke -- routine maintenance was not really part of the deal -- and the lame thrasher redblock gassers could tolerate that .... break the timing belt, overheat it, whatever, they would just keep on going. That attitude was not a good match for the diesels. But they blamed it on the car rather than themselves of course, and the notorious rep kept growing.
Meanwhile the same idiot hearsay can give a false positive reputation just as easily as a negative one. The internet will tell you that a MB OM61x motor will run 3 million miles with zero maintenance using peanut oil as fuel. BS -- they wear out just as easily as anything else if abused or neglected. And likewise like (almost) anything else, they are capable of long life if maintained. So is a D24 or an old Chevy 327 for that matter.
