I would liked to have written an epic, three part story about our new vehicle purchase. It would have been great fun to write a long, romantic tale of chasing down our ideal car across three states - but I can't. It'd be a big fat lie.
Here's what really happened.
Last year's purchase of a BMW 320i ("Replacing the Drunken Friend" ) had slowly turned into an obvious stopgap, rather than a long-term replacement for a Jeep Cherokee. Quite soon after the birth of our second child Olivia, it was obvious that the little beemer was simply too small, although we made do. Shopping trips had become exercises in creative boot packing, as our expanded grocery haul squeezed beside a pram. The combination of two child seats in the narrow, short E36 cabin was plainly ludicrous. Isabella, our 4 year old, kicked the front seat incessantly whenever I drove the car as her rear legroom was painfully reduced.
This situation was a great pity. I've yet to come across a more accomplished chassis than the E36. There is some real, exploitable ability in that over-engineered car. Nicely sensitive to throttle inputs (even with a weedy 110kW), huge reserves of grip, fabulous brakes, nicely weighted steering and beautiful balance make the car an endearing choice for challenging roads. The two main annoyances (lack of grunt, lack of space) were mostly outweighed by the rewards, even if they were seldom exploited while we travelled in cramped style. It still looked good, too. BMW did a nice job with the E36: the guards are a touch muscular; the headlight treatment is a nice update of the 4 headlight look of the previous model. I liked the car a lot, although I still wished it was a 325i...
What really made it obvious that we needed a bigger car were our trips to the local plant nursery. We could never get any plants, fertiliser or other supplies into the car without one of the adults having to fold themselves into the rear seat. It simply wasn't practical with two children. The Cherokee was sorely missed at this task; it's no-nonsense interior was cramped, but at least you could fold the rear seat out of the way for larger items.
Not that replacing the BMW was an urgent priority. Between Tina and I, we agreed that if a decent, larger car turned up, we would take a look. For various reasons, we still didn't want to buy another four-wheel drive wagon: too space inefficient and ultimately a waste of ability we never used. I harboured a pointless desire for another Alfa 164 (blind enthusiast that I am), having conveniently forgotten about the endless, expensive electrical problems and horrifying depreciation we suffered on the first one. Using a variety of sources, I identified a few suspects and casually enquired about them over the course of a week or so. It was at a car yard in Northern Sydney that I stumbled across our new (well, new to us) car.
A big, ugly station wagon. A big, metallic burgundy station wagon that looks a lot like it was styled using nothing more than a hunk of clay and a meat cleaver.
A Volvo.
Despite fellow columnist Forg's enthusiasm for the things, I have to say that I've never really been impressed with Volvo's range. For too many years they seemed to serve up endless numbers of ugly, rear drive dross dressed in slightly different, squared-off styles. Who can really tell the difference between a 240, 740 or 940? Did Volvo serve up the same stodge in bizarrely new, square cut ways or is there really a difference between the cars? OK, you got a choice of Volvo's rugged - but rough - 4 cylinder engines, or the endless oil-leaking joy that is the wheezy PRV 6. The Volvo turbo stuff was always mildly interesting from a purely academic point of view, but never appealed to me enough to warrant investigation. The 7-seater wagons might be OK for Joe Family, but the sedans? Robbie Francevic's exploits in the Australian Touring Car Championship (eons ago) were memorable, but ultimately a stupid marketing exercise. Did the racing 850 wagons in the BTCC set off any cynical alarm bells in anybody else? Surely the cars must be garbage.
But hang on. I'm Joe Family now...
This thought had me peering into the cavernous space of the Volvo in question. What was this thing? I had to look at the tailgate badge to find out...all Volvo's seem to look pretty much the same to me. OK, it's an 850. What's that mean again? Front wheel drive and 5 cylinders, I dimly recalled. I eyed the multi-folding back seat, the third seat that neatly folded out of the floor, trying to calculate how many bags of dirt I could get in there. Mmmm, nice leather seats too. More interested, I looked at the pricetag (a touch under AUD$30,000). Then I looked at the wheels. They looked huge! The enormous brakes! What is this, a joke? Some pathetic Dad trying to dress up his Volvo like a sports car? The badge on the tail gate was the giveaway: 850 T5. The turbo jobbie.
All 166kW of it.
The rational part of my mind was disengaged at this point. For the same (or less) amount of money, you can plant your bum in a brand new Mitsubishi Magna wagon, not some cast-off from 1994 with 180,000km on the clock. I truly wanted to hate the car. It was an automatic (damn, that means there'd be no objections from Tina). It had more features than should be legal (traction control, cruise control, a trip computer, CD-capable factory stereo, climate control, 16-inch wheels, creamy leather seats). Surely it'd have to drive like the bucket of worn out junk that it was? I warily took the keys off the bemused sales guy (who had thought that he finally had a live one for that Alfa 164 that had been sitting on his lot for 2 months....) and took the Volvo for a spin.
The initial impressions were encouraging. It was awful to drive. The driveline clunked and shuddered away like it was barely attached to the chassis. The four bald tyres offered little in the way of communication. It didn't feel like it had a turbocharger at all - just a lumpy, torquey response from 2,500 rpm which didn't feel spectacular. No "light the blue touch paper" old-school turbo response from the 20-valve, five cylinder engine. Giving it a bit more throttle revealed that it picked up speed rather quickly and deceptively. It started to grow on me, despite the prominent Volvo grille. The engine elicited an offbeat, warbly noise when extended which, while not unpleasant, didn't bear comparison to the silk-tearing noise of the BMW's refined six. The driver's seat was comfortable: nicely bolstered and easily adjustable. All the electrical toys seemed to be working. I decided to drive a little further - down to a corner near my house I normally use for sorting out the good from the bad. The particular piece of road in question is a poorly engineered mess that's slowly being beaten into a lumpen track by heavy trucks. The nasty off-camber turn-in and bumpy road surface quickly reveals flaws in vehicle dynamics.
And the Volvo had plenty of them.
The BMW usually loved every bit of that corner, except for the section where you clip the apex and nail the throttle, at which point the little six would lazily start to wind up rather than instantly punching away, leaving you unfulfilled. The Volvo was an entirely different experience. To begin with, the suspension was harder than the BMW. The tyres were of a lower profile. The brakes (ABS in this case, something the BMW was missing) were a tad spongy but powerful all the same. For a big station wagon, the turn in was pretty good, better than it should be given the height of the thing. It stayed very flat, the pendulous steering imprecise and heavily self-centring. The mid-corner bumps thudded and thumped through the shell, the 850's trade off for flat handling being stiff legs. The plush interior creaked and shuddered in sympathy with the hard working suspension. The amplified bumps should have thrown the car off line, but it retained a surprising amount of lateral grip, given the punishment I was getting in the cabin. At the apex, I nailed the throttle, expecting to be dragged out of the corner at a rapid rate - but something odd happened. The Volvo appeared momentarily to go nowhere, accompanied by a howl and a puff of smoke from near the driver's wheel arch. After what seemed like an eternity, it finally started to hook up - but not before leaving a 30 metre black rubber strip on the road. Under duress, the chassis was incapable of putting the turbo engine's 166kW to the road.
No wonder it had traction control. What sort of a modern car allows that kind of unruly behaviour to escape the development cycle? I hated it so much I did it again.
Back at the dealership, I parked the car with driver's side facing a wall so nobody would notice the heavily feathered front tyre. I popped open the bonnet thoughtfully to examine the ticking engine and was rejoined by the salesman, who in the meantime had been greedily eyeing the BMW.
"Whad'ya think?" he said, uncertain. We could both smell hot transmission fluid, a small pool of which was forming at my feet.
"Well, it feels like it's on its last legs. That leak looks bad, there are two broken engine mounts, the odometer reads like the car has been used as a backup for the Leyland Brothers on one of their cross country trips..."
He interrupted me: "We can offer you a good trade on the BMW - it's more like the sort of car we keep here..."
I continued unabated: "...and there are the four bald tyres to consider. I'd have to buy it cheap enough so I could factor in a transmission replacement. Plus, I don't really like Volvos."
Which was a lie. I actually liked this car. I still wanted to hate it though. The utility of seven seats would appeal to Tina and the warbly five pot turbomotor put a grin on my face. I offered him an obviously insulting amount of money, which didn't prevent us from parting amiably after exchanging phone numbers.
Once home, I started rifling through the dusty stack of old magazines in the shed, looking for road tests of 850's. Most of them confirmed what I had found out myself: the turbo versions had a woeful habit of not quite gripping under acceleration, but were otherwise fairly sound. There weren't too many competitors for the wagon in contemporary tests. I trawled through Web mailing lists looking for common problems with the cars. They don't seem to be as well regarded as the Volvo 240 but I largely ascribed that to the blind nature of enthusiasm (easy to pick, Alfa nuts are much worse than the Volvo crowd at ignoring obvious engineering defects). There didn't seem to be too many "I bought a Volvo Lemon" hate sites either.
Over the next couple of days, the sales guy rang a couple of times and we lazily negotiated. I didn't see a CD changer in the car (which he acknowledged was missing), he would have to get the engine mounts and the transmission leak fixed (easy - everything is easily accessible under the bonnet and the transmission leak turned out to be a dipstick tube knocked loose by the motor flapping about). I had a quick look at a couple of later model 850R wagons, but they were all substantially more expensive than the T5, didn't have the "sleeper" factor due to 17 inch wheels and bright paint jobs, and none of them had quite the mix of features I needed. The other cars either had seven seats and a manual transmission, or were automatic but had 5 seats and cloth upholstery. Unbelievably, we reached a point in the financial negotiations that I thought was fair and I picked the T5 up a couple of days later.
Gripes so far? Other than the stiff legged chassis, the high beam headlights are fairly pathetic (we've been spoiled by great BMW headlights), the automatic transmission appears to throw a bit of a tizzy occasionally when cold (most likely a failing gear position sensor say the Volvo service guys) and four new Pirelli P7000 tyres cost me $900, which was a bummer. I hate space-saver spare tyres, but I have to admit that the flat load floor and fold-out 3rd row of seating is clever enough to put up with it.
The good stuff is very good indeed. The Volvo has proved to have impeccable highway manners, the suspension smooths out nicely at (high) speed, overtaking and hill climbing is an absolute snap and cruise control has made a welcome re-appearance in our motoring. All of our junk is easily swallowed by the huge load area, which features some nice touches: there's a pair of fold out luggage nets which stretch out from the back seat to the roof, or alternatively a removable luggage blind. The child seat anchorage points, like the seat belts, are integrated into the rear seat itself, making no inroads into the luggage area. None of the locally built station wagons (or 4 wheel drives for that matter) offer the kind of utility that Volvo do in this regard. Not even Subaru have that kind of attention to detail.
There was one last gripe: the CD changer. The car would probably have been delivered with one, and I didn't want to spend $500 on an Alpine changer that would work with the factory head unit. Partly convinced it was sitting in the back room of the dealer, I was surprised to find it - in perfect working order - under the passenger seat!
|