STAFF CAR SAGAS
Salvage Hunter Paul Cowland shares his latest purchase
When your stock-in-trade is slightly careworn old motors, it’s sometimes quite amazing how they find you. As well as stumbling across them on an almost daily basis, I also find myself the grateful recipient of many a text or phone call asking me if I’d like to find a home for some automotive waif or stray. Occasionally, like some old lady that takes in homeless cats, the door will knock with something I simply can’t say ‘no’ to. And that’s how this lovely old Volvo V70 came to be.
A delightful, elderly neighbour called Noel had owned this car ever since it was new. Having covered a scant 64,000 miles in the intervening 25 years, with a full service history, I’d often admired it when parked up on his drive. Speaking as an ex-Saab employee, there’s just something about these superbly built Swedish shoeboxes that really does it for me. They may have been my arch enemy in period, but they were always a very worthy foe, too – from a time when Volvo’s were still beautifully engineered and built to give many decades of faithful service.
A distraught Noel recently asked me if I would have the car taken to the scrapyard for him as he’d just had the misfortune to significantly scrape the whole driver’s side down a sizeable bollard. Naturally, I told him it was an easy fix to get her ship shape once again, but with his confidence shaken, and mind made up, Noel sadly decided to give up driving that day – and for good.
Too good to scrap
A few days later, he reluctantly agreed to take a few hundred notes for the old girl, After all, he’d at least have had the scrap value – and this car was far too good not to save. With that mileage, as well as being the sonorous fiv-epot with its lounge-lizard SE spec, this really does have the potential to be a fabulous daily driver. And what motoring question can’t be answered with the words, ‘Volvo estate’? This is the Swiss Army Knife of Nineties cars, and in the magazine that does more than any other to champion the cause of practical classics, then which automotive creation could be any more of either?
Massive dents aside, the old girl is in remarkably good shape. The engine sings, the box shifts cleanly, and the bushes and dampers feel exactly as you’d hope a fully serviced, low mileage old Volvo might. She’s due another change of everything, of course, having sat for a while, plus a fre
