► Mark Walton buys a Volvo V70
► He’s smitten, as you might be able to tell
► The last real Volvo?
I bought a Volvo. Yes, with my own money, and yes, I did it after our eBay feature (due online soon!) – not before.
This, I hasten to add, is not a usual occurrence for me. I drove a Lamborghini Revuelto last year – didn’t buy one. Drove a McLaren 750S – didn’t buy one. Tested a Rolls-Royce Ghost – did not immediately go down to a dealer to put in an order. But, strangely, something about that knackered, high-mileage £1500 Swedish lådvagn got under my skin.
I appreciate that Man Buys Old Volvo isn’t exactly hold-the-front-page headline news, but as a car journalist I find people are often interested in what I choose to buy with my own cash, so thought I’d share.
Read the story in this issue to get the background on how I found myself in an old Volvo estate. Everything I describe in the feature is absolutely true – I really was struck by the V70’s character, its integrity. Its build quality reminded me of driving a 1970s Porsche or a 1980s Mercedes – the heavy clunk of the door, the sturdiness of the switchgear, the firmness of the dashboard plastics. The V70 possesses that same feeling of being over-engineered, designed for the long haul – I kept imagining those hardy Volvo engineers, working in the dark at the company’s most northerly test facility, in Kiruna, Lapland, inside the Arctic Circle. In my mind they’re there, enduring frigid temperatures and snowstorms, just to ensure the pop-out cupholder operates at -30ºC. ‘Ja, perfekt!’
If the V70 feels like it was signed off by people who cared more about a brand promise than pure profit, that’s probably because it was. Introduced in 2000, this second-generation V70 (known as the P2) was the last true Volvo-made Volvo before the company was sold to Ford in 1999. The next generation – the P3, launched in 2007 – was essentially a rebodied Ford Mondeo. The P2 really counted for something, and it shows.
So I get home after our coast-to-coast eBay trip and I can’t stop thinking about it. And then a cunning plan starts to form in my mind: we’re in need of a new family workhorse, something to lug around muddy dogs and kids. We’d been hovering around a secondhand Discovery Sport, maybe a leased Dacia Jogger… How about we risk it on a 20-year-old Volvo instead?
Like all blokes about to make a purchase, I then go down the internet rabbit hole of research. We need four-wheel drive to get up a Welsh mountain track, so it has to be the XC70 – essentially the same car but with raised suspension and Haldex 4×4. And while my petrol/manual eBay car was enjoyable I need better mpg, so I end up looking at the five-cylinder diesel, the legendary D5, with an auto ‘box. Pre-2005 Euro 3 models are the simplest; after that the engine got cleaner but also more complicated with particulate filters and ‘swirl flaps’ in the air intake, but they’re still absolutely bombproof, renowned for plodding on for 300,000 miles.
So, with all the advice saying I should look at the service record not the mileage, I end up buying a 2007 car, one of the last P2s, with two owners, a full history and 130,000 on the clock. I paid £3800 for it, though the radio was broken (a blown sound board – a common fault). It cost £200 to fix, through Trowbridge-based Revive Car Audio – and while the system was out I added a Bluetooth adaptor, a £30 eBay purchase that plugs into an aux socket in the back of the head unit.
It feels like a lot of car for the money. The dark blue paintwork is certainly ‘lived-in’ but overall it’s in good condition. It has a charcoal grey leather interior with aluminium trim, which is a plus (lots of examples have a yellow-beige leather and ‘old Jag’-spec wooden dashboards). The leather is still in amazing condition, like polished rhino hide. Yes, the D5 engine is coarse at low speeds, it sounds like a bus pulling away from a stop; and yes, the handling is elastic like a 1970s Cadillac DeVille. But late at night, cruising along a motorway on a long journey, the interior glows like it’s lit by a candle, and the car feels calm and comforting. It’s like hiding from an arctic blizzard inside a log cabin – dense, quiet and secure. Keep your Revueltos – I absolutely love it.
Editor-at-large Mark Walton loves F1, loves old circuits, but also loves flushing toilets