Volvo S80 D5 | Shed of the Week
High mileage hero? Try the 300 Club...
Cosmetic injectables are becoming all the rage these days. Even the Sheds have been swept up by it. Mrs Shed has been investing heavily in tubs – OK, drums – of collagen in an attempt to boost her allure, while Shed has been wondering if there’s anything he can inject into his eyeballs to make Mrs Shed look better.
He’s had no luck on that front, so instead he’s been concentrating on what he hopes might be a more achievable health goal, i.e. sorting his knee out. It’s been giving him gyp for years. A new plastic one would be the obvious answer. He could go private to get it, but as a (sort of) taxpayer he prefers to stick it out on the NHS waiting list on a point of stinginess, sorry, principle. Plus he has a few other bits and pieces he wouldn’t mind having replaced, hopefully restoring him to the man he once was, so he very much wants to remain in the free zone for as long as possible.
High mileage cars like this week’s Volvo S80 Shed are what he uses as his inspiration for immortality through parts replacement. Try to not look at the mileage stat below the pics. First, take a squint at the pics and then have a guess at it. The condition looks easily good enough for you to venture a guess of under 100,000, until you remember that there’s no such thing as a low-mileage D5-engined Volvo. They don’t exist. People buy D5s because they know they’ll take the miles, and they do, so they do.
All right then, 200 thousand, that’s a perfectly normal D5 mileage isn’t it? Nope. Keep going. 250? It can’t be 300, surely? That’s right, it can’t – because it’s 344,000. Three hundred and forty-four thousand miles. Why, that’s the same as Shed going to the post office and back 172,000 times, another long-term ambition of his.
If the history file has been kept as scrupulously as the car itself it must be an amazing read, especially if you do it with a calculator to tot up exactly how much has been spent on it over the last twenty years. We know from the ad that it’s had five cambelt changes and two gearbox rebuilds. On top of that, it will have munched through quite a few consumables. With 47 service stamps it’s already on its second service book and must be well on the way to its third.
The bod responsible for the fulminating ad copy must have gone through a thesaurus or two in the course of his labours. They deflate you a bit at the end by not offering a warranty on it because of the mileage. Shed doesn’t get that. As far as he’s concerned this sort of mileage is a plus, not a minus. Just think of all the fascinating conversations you can have at owner’s club meetings! Hmm, yes, well, thinking about it, maybe keep that part of it quiet until you’re reasonably sure you’re not going to be bored to death by some desperate bloke with a cardigan, a clipboard and a combover.
Someone will probably come onto the forum to say that the paint isn’t perfect, that the driver’s seat is a bit low on one side, or that there are six scratches on the radio surround. Again Shed doesn’t give a tuppeny toss about any of that. What does matter to him is the MOT history. In twenty tests covering the last 250,000-odd miles there have been just two entries: a fail for an intrusive windscreen sticker in 2008 at 196,000 miles and an advisory for front tyre wear in 2020 at 336,000.
Is this ‘Trigger’s broom’ concept of car ownership a valid one? Shed says that he’d definitely go down that route to motoring sustainability, if only he wasn’t so damnably mean. It just needs a strong will, a strong enough base to start with and a readiness to throw the occasional sum of cash at it. If he was curating Volvo’s museum though, spending someone else’s money, he’d be banging in a bid right now. What an advert for a badge.
Shame it isn't an estate.
But at £2k horrendously overpriced.
£2k seems a lot until you go car shopping for other £2k cars and realise how low the bar is at this sort of price. It’s probably not a bad buy.
Shame it isn't an estate.
But at £2k horrendously overpriced.
Pre-Covid I sold a 245,000 mile Audi 1.8T Quattro Sport which looked like it had done less than 100k and on which everything still worked like new, for the grand sum of £750, and now would probably be a ‘2’ in front of that for some enterprising seller.
Shame it isn't an estate.
But at £2k horrendously overpriced.
£2k seems a lot until you go car shopping for other £2k cars and realise how low the bar is at this sort of price. It’s probably not a bad buy.
It's wareing it's almost 350,000 miles well , this era of Volvo are well built.and the D5 isn't a bad engine.i had it in an 05 S60 and.it was perfect in the 4 years or so I owned it .
Obviously by the condition it's been well looked after but who in their right mind is going to give £2000 for it, certainly not me.
2 gearbox rebuilds, 5 cambelts and an exemplary MOT history has got to be as good as it gets. Great find/shedGassing Station | General Gassing | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff