As of writing this right now, It has just turned 02:00am on the 1st of March, a couple of energy drinks have been consumed, NF is playing through wireless earphones & there are numerous tabs & programs opened up on my PC. One of these is Google Chrome and the other is the Photo App where an old picture of my C70 is currently greeting me. I should be asleep right about now but there are two reasons why I’m not. The first reason why I’m awake is that I’m looking at car parts I need to buy to get the C70 roadworthy again and the second reason is simply that sleep doesn’t exist.
Add in the fact that I’m looking at old pictures & posts on Facebook that involve the C70, I’ve decided to do a little post about what It’s been like to own my Volvo for what is coming up to 8 years. With that in mind, sit back, get comfy, and learn what It’s like to own such a car for such a long time!
As already mentioned, this article is coming to you guys from the very early hours of the morning & I really should be sleeping but given the circumstances, I’m currently in, I’ve decided to write a little something. I hope the Energy Drinks I’ve had work for long enough so I can jot down a well-rounded and informative piece on the C70 but time will only tell.
For those that are either new or out of the loop, I own a ’00’ MK1 Volvo C70 Coupé that I’ve had since the 6th of March 2015. This C70 in question is my first ever car and whilst that accolade might have died down over the 8 years of ownership, back in 2015 when I was a borderline 18-year-old, that was an extremely big deal for myself, my family, my friends & everyone all round – for better or worse!
Given that I’ve owned the car for coming up to 8 years, I have been very lucky to go through the archives of old posts, pictures & memories that have been collected throughout the years of ownership. These all include numerous jobs I’ve done to the car over the years that will still be ongoing even if the car is currently in an undisclosed storage unit at the time of writing this. The posts & pictures that have gone along with them have especially been something to look back on, both with happiness as well as sadness.
So, what exactly is the story with me and the C70 then? Over ten years ago now, when I was a mere adolescent with no idea of how the world exactly worked, I was a Pupil in high school that had had an interest in cars from a very young age. With this in mind, even though I could barely drive a car on the Playstation or Xbox, I was always on my iPad looking at cars for sale that I could only dream of owning.
As the years went on, the cars I was looking at went from cars I could only dream of owning to left-field choices that could easily be had as a first car. Some of these included an MG ZR 1.4, an ‘R50’ BMW Mini ‘One’, an MK2 Toyota Yaris SR 1.3, an MK1 Ford Focus & even an Alfa Romeo 147. All of these cars would’ve made the perfect first car in all their own different little ways but you might be sitting there wondering and asking yourself “well, what made you overlook all those cars above and go for the C70 instead?!”
I’d always wanted my first car to be left-field and somewhat cool for a young 17-year-old driver and while a lot of the cars mentioned above were affordable, the main issue was the insurance costs. For example, the MG ZR 1.4 mentioned above could easily be bought for £1000 back in 2015 but the insurance was well over double the price of the car and this was a very similar story with the plethora of cars I was looking at. This of course made It extremely frustrating to find something I liked but was also affordable. This is where, weirdly, my parents decided to play an absolute ace which completely flipped everything I knew on Its head.
See, unbeknownst to me, whilst I was looking at first cars and jumping ship to other options every few weeks, my Parents were wanting to get rid of their Honda CR-V MK1 and into a Subaru Legacy Outback or something similar. Unfortunately, we couldn’t afford such a car because they were well outwith our budget but this didn’t stop us from trying. We decided It was better off looking at normal large family estates that were within budget and by doing that, we soon realized that we could easily afford to get into an MK2 Volvo V70 Estate. We’d never been Volvo owners before so as a certain Jeremy Clarkson would say, “How Hard Can It Be?!”
To cut a long story short, my parents bought a 2001 Volvo S80 MK1 2.4 ‘S’ that I really fell in love with since I first clapped eyes on it, and upon spending a weekend traveling down to the outskirts of London to pick It up, I knew that I had to at least look at a Volvo for myself once we got home. Upon coming home, I started looking at some for sale but didn’t quite find something that I was interested in until I found a C70 Coupé that was very similar to mine. After doing some research on them, I knew I had to have one straight away. Cut to 8 months later on the 6th of March 2015, I became the proud owner of my very own C70!
So what’s It been like to own then?! Well, in all honesty, It has definitely had Its ups & downs. It’s no lie that throughout the years, the car has been more of a mechanical project than a car I can actually go out & drive but even with that, I still wouldn’t part with It. Yes, It can be a pain when something breaks, especially when It’s in a place where the part can’t easily be reached but isn’t that the whole point of owning a Project Car?!
Looking back at all the jobs I’ve done to It, all the posts I’ve put up about it, and all the endless pictures I’ve taken of It over the 8 years of ownership, you’d be easily mistaken for thinking that owning It has been an absolute breeze but in all honesty, It has been far from easy trying to keep it going. there have been endless scraped knuckles, numerous swear words muttered & numerous parts broken & subsequently replaced.
So what exactly do we have here then?! Well, ‘ProjectC70′ as she is known as, is a ’00’ Model year C70 Coupé, fitted to it is the smallest engine available for the C70, a 2.0T 5-cylinder unit (B5204T4) which is DOHC, 20v, Turbocharged and is made solely of Aluminium Alloy which makes It very strong yet quite light. The MK1 C70 in general was co-developed by Volvo & Tom Walkinshaw Racing or ‘TWR’ for short and sat on the ‘P80’ platform, the same platform as the Volvo 850 T5, T5-R and then later the 850R. The design was penned by none-other than Ian Callum under Peter Horbury’s supervision. C70’s production ran from ’96 all the way through to ’05 and was available either in Coupé or Convertible body styles. Three gearboxes were available with the C70 throughout Its life, these included two Aisin Automatic Gearboxes, an AW50-42LE 4-speed in the earlier cars and an AW55-50SN 5-speed in the later cars. There was only one Manual Gearbox option available and that was known as the ‘M56’. This was Volvo’s own Gearbox and was a 5-Speed affair that had also seen the light of day in the likes of the 850, the S70, the V70 MK1, the V70 XC & even in early models of the S60 & MK2 V70 that came out after the turn of the millennium. My C70 has the ‘M56’ Gearbox attached to it and it just adds to the whole driving experience, the gearbox truly matches the engine it’s bolted to and that really does make the 8 years of ups & downs worth it. Due to its age & the platform it sits upon, it’s also a lot more mechanical than some people might think.
Because of this, the little C70 is so easy to work on and is built so well that when something does break or needs replacing, you just fix the issue and need not worry about it again. Also because It’s one of the last cars where an owner can actually work on It themselves with simple hand tools, this means It can easily be fixed without plugging It in every time a warning light comes on or subsequently, needing to use really expensive, specialist tools. There’s something that’s just so satisfying about putting earphones in, music blaring, with tools in hand going to work on your own car and fixing Its little foibles!
In fact, that is probably the main reason why It’s still here under my ownership. The C70 has been such a joy to work on & fix as well as own that trying to find anything else to replace It with has had Its challenges. To some people, It may only be a 22-year-old car that doesn’t have a lot of value in It but to me, It’s become part of the family and has loads more sentimental value than actual monetary value. In fact, if someone was to come up to me and say that they’d give me the money to buy my dream car in my dream spec – an Aston Martin DB9, but that’d mean that I’d have to sell the C70, I’d keep the C70 hands down & no amounts of money will ever change my mind!
The C70 has always been there whilst I’ve dealt with my own personal issues over these last 8 years too, some of those include health issues, family issues, and, more recently, death, and even through all that It’s still there to help me through it. Some people use stress balls to take their minds off of certain things but I use the car.
Through the 8 years of ownership, It can be difficult to pick out a crowning moment that has stood the testament of time so It comes as no surprise that I’m having to rack my brain for a memory that sums the whole ownership up but if I was to pick a memory that made me feel really good, It’d be when I got it featured in a ‘Modern Classics’ Magazine a couple of years ago & wound up getting ‘Star Letter’. It’s moments like those that can really make ownership of a project car that little bit more enjoyable.
What I will say though is that over the 8 years of ownership, I still have the same amount of love for It that I did all those years ago when I first clocked eyes on It. Owning It for all these years has certainly been a challenge but I’d never change It for the world. To some people, cars just get you from A to B with no real reason or questions asked but to us petrolheads, the car is the whole reason!
Hope You Enjoy!
By Alex Jebson
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