Shed Of The Week: Volvo V50

What, a Volvo estate Shed that isn't a V70? It's happened!

Gruntier 200hp-plus versions of the faithful old Volvo V70 estate have long been beloved by the PH massive. There's still no shortage of these incredibly useful and generally reliable buses around, but properly desirable ones are getting a bit harder to find.

It's OK though, because riding bravely into the Shed of the Week spotlight comes our first Volvo V50 estate. Described by Volvo on its 2003 launch as perfect for 'young, dynamic and demanding families', this elegantly downsized sportswagon is a much more modern-looking beast than the wardrobe-on-wheels V70.

Powered by a Ford/PSA-developed 2.0-litre turbodiesel, built on a Focus platform and assembled in the land of mayonnaised chips (Belgium), the V50 could hardly be described a classic Swedish motor. But it was extremely practical in the best Swedish style with a completely flat load floor when the back seats were folded down, and you could fold the front passenger seat down too.

The V50 wasn't super-light, at between 1,450 and 1,520kg, but it did have a good feeling of solidity about it which, when combined with the lag-free motor and lovely high gearing (38mph per 1,000rpm in sixth), made it a fine motorway cruiser. The electro-hydraulic steering was a bit dumb but the suspension was quite well judged. More than one contemporary road tester preferred the Volvo's general demeanour over that of the £1,500 more expensive Audi A4 TDI PD 130, even if it was down on the German car's load-carrying capacity.

Peter Horbury's styling has managed to stay remarkably fresh for a 14-year-old design, and you do get that rather cool 'floating' centre stack dashboard thingy behind which you can hide many things, often forever. There were also 'discreet lighting points to create a theatre-like effect', something Mrs Shed might have liked to add a little spice to her '2 for 1' specials at the local dogging lay-by.

Another neat V50 design feature was the ability it gave to its owners to easily remove the complete front lamp assembly for bulb replacement, something VW never wanted us to have as they preferred owners to pay them to do that.

The V50 wasn't perfect, of course. It wasn't massively economical, reflections in the floating panel made it hard to use, and the knuckle-skinningly slender door pockets were about as useful as an accordion player on a deer hunt.

A decade or so on, what should you look out for? The 2.0-litre D2 is arguably a better bet than the 1.6 DrivE, which suffered from turbo difficulties, but its designer electronic ignition key had a habit of getting stuck in its slot, leading to a scandal in 2006 when there was a five-month backlog for replacements. Other than that, fill in your own list of (by no means Volvo-unique) usual suspects: electrical glitches, EGR valve failure, wheel bearings, brakes.

The ad creation technique for this particular V50 seems to involve driving the car onto a turntable, switching the turntable on and then pressing the camera's shutter release eight times at 45-degree intervals. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to include opening the doors, photographing the insides or giving much in the way of detail on the car.

We can tell you that the MoT history is not frightening, though it looks like a new brake disc, exhaust and rear ARB might be required to get it through the next one, which will take place in eight months' time.

The nice thing about modern cars like this is that, in finest 'mapped 335d' tradition, you can easily up the performance ante. A £200 chip will boost this car's power and torque by 25 per cent and deliver an appreciable improvement in fuel economy to boot. Failing that you could dig up a rather more expensive T5 AWD version, or try to find a Volvo V50 SV, which had 340hp. Good luck with that though, as they only built one.

Here's the ad.

Silver, 5+ owners, Climate Control, Alarm, Electric Windows (Front/Rear). 5 seats, SOME IMAGES ARE TAKEN BEFORE VEHICLES ARE VALETED ..OVER 120 CARS IN STOCK, £795