Every now and then, for a spot of relaxation, Shed likes to drive up to his local golf course where he will whip his niblick out, waggle it around in the approved manner and, with any luck, get some good contact with his balls.
However, if the postmistress isn't there, he might stump up for a round of golf instead. When he does that he's always amazed by what happens. There's hardly ever a time when all the parts of his game are working well at the same time. If the chipping is good, the putting will be awful. If the putting is working, the driving will be pants.
A similar sort of thing seems to happen with old Volvo estates. Shed is a sucker for a V70, but trying to pin down all the desirable features he requires in one car has always been hard and is only getting harder as the supply gradually dries up. The features in question are (a) T5 for the power, (b) manual gearbox for the reliability, (c) reasonable mileage for long-term ownership prospects and (d) reasonable price for short-term financial health.
Very rarely do you get a full house in V70 Bingo, but this week Shed thinks he may have dib-dobbed a line at the very least with this privately owned '02 T5 manual that has just 131,000 miles up, a few honestly recorded faults and a £1,400 price tag. For Shed, a totally golden V70 wouldn't have any corrosion, and that's normally a shoe-in with these as they're very resistant to the brown stuff. Annoyingly (not to say very unusually) there is some bubbling on the tailgate of this one, giving you the idea that it may have been in a small shunt at some point.
Still, Shed is very reassured by the seller's no-messing approach. The MOT history is equally transparent about the car's gradual fading over the last few years. The trail is clearly marked and none of what you read there should put you off. Some uneven wear was reported on the rear tyres in 2014 at 94,000 miles, and a couple of years later, worn rear ARB bushes and linkages popped to at least partly explain why. Corroded rear springs came and went in 2017, and the ad expands on that by telling us that all the springs and dampers have been replaced. We're told that the air-con and cruise don't work, that one of the alloys has been kerbed, and that the lacquer is falling off the front passenger door, but we can also see that only 6,000 or so miles have been put on it every year. The overall impression you get is of an apparently unhammered car that's been given what it's needed when it's needed it.
What will you end up with here if you dip your hand in your pocket? A wonderfully comfortable and sturdy load lugger that also happens to be a sports car with 250hp at 5,200rpm, 243lb ft from 2,400-5,200rpm, 0-60 in a whisker over six seconds, 155mph top end, 25-30mpg at a gentle cruise and a great five-cylinder warble.
Sure, that mpg figure will drop to the mid-teens if you drive it with a right boot modelled on Thor's hammer (one PHer claimed to have got his one down to 9mpg), and you may run into other problems such as broken window regulators (£200 a pop), noisy wipers, non-displaying dash displays, duff throttle position sensors, breaking rear brake shoes and brake boosters, and the peculiar sounding overheating cooling fan. Oh yes, and a turning circle that will seem entirely acceptable to captains of oil tankers.
Even if you do get tripped up by some or all of the (pretty minor) V70 issues, it's surely worth it for an overall package that is so ergonomically excellent, that should give you sterling service for years to come, and that will hopefully still look as good twenty years from now as it does twenty years after it was launched. If this wagon is still for sale by the end of next week Shed will boil up his trusty 5-wood with some Oxo cubes and, without wearing protective gear, serve it to Mrs Shed as a tasty broth.
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