Mine didn’t look this good, sadly.
When the lease on my SE-R was up, rather than replacing it with another new, or newish, car, I went completely the other way and replaced it with the cheapest thing that came to hand. That way I could concentrate on finishing my bachelor’s and moving straight to going for a master’s, without the burden of a car payment hanging over me.
Lucky for me, my aunt just happened to have such a car ready for me, her 1985 Volvo 740GLE sedan. She had just bought a second-generation Toyota 4Runner and was no longer driving the Volvo. It was 10 years old at that point, and time hadn’t been good to it. Although mostly, it was my aunt’s doing, not so much time. Gina’s practice was to neglect a car’s maintenance until something broke, then take it to the dealership and get raked over the coals while they fixed the broken stuff and tried to bring other systems back up to some sort of standard. Procrastination is in Gina’s nature. She’d even procrastinated on filling her gas tank, to the point of running out of gas, not once but several times.
Gina got stuck in snow a lot because she didn’t know she had to activate the 4WD. Photo credit: Mr. Choppers.
So that was the kind of treatment the Volvo had received, until at some point I guess even Gina got tired of putting money into it. So when the power antenna broke and would no longer retract into the rear fender, she bent it forward and slammed the rear door shut on it. Problem fixed! Scratches in the black paint? No problem, touch them up with whatever paint you can find, even if it’s blue!
Worst of all, her boyfriend had backed his Blazer into it, and the spare tire carrier scratched up the hood. Now maybe it’s just me, but it seems to me that a boyfriend worth his snuff, recognizing his mistake, would get it fixed properly. Not Chester. No, Chester sent Gina to some fly-by-night screwball homie of his who resprayed the hood with paint so cheap that not even a self-respecting juvenile delinquent would tag a fence with it. The paint crazed and turned chalky and looked just awful.
But the car was free, so I gritted my teeth and took it. It had 150,000 miles when it came to me and over the next four years I put another 100,000 on it driving between grad school, my internship, and my weekend job. The door bottoms were rusty, in spite of Gina having had the car Ziebarted, and the trunk floor had rust holes as a result of some persistent leak that had never been addressed. The A/C didn’t work and the seat heater didn’t either. Some pot metal arm in the sliding sunroof broke, so it would intermittently pop open during freeway drives. And the headliner came unglued and began falling down, billowing around my head until I got fed up with it and ripped it out.
I went over the car with polishing compound and got it to shine pretty well, except for that terrible hood, and the car didn’t look too bad from fifteen feet away. I tried to find the one picture I took of it, but it seems to be lost, so the lead photo isn’t mine. Picture a slightly down-at-the-heels looking black Volvo 740 sedan and you’ll have the idea.
The 740- and 760-series were Volvo’s attempt at moving upmarket with the new models, rather than dressing up an existing car with a vinyl roof and thick C-pillars like the Bertone Coupe. I always thought it was weird how the 740 and 760 turned out to resemble B-body GMs like LeSabres and Olds Ninety-Eights. The same low-hood, high-trunk profile is there. Except that, Volvo being Volvo, they were having none of that rounded-off corners nonsense. The cars appeared on the scene too close to each other for one company to have cribbed off the other, but who knows? Certainly, neither Mercedes-Benz, BMW, nor Audi were headed in this styling direction.
Gina even put whitewalls on hers, cementing the resemblance further.
See, I’m not the only one who sees a 740 and thinks Oldsmobile Brougham.
Anyway, the result was a roomy, pleasant near-luxury sedan, but as it aged, it was clear that it was a little underdeveloped in the areas that Consumer Reports calls hardware and body integrity.
The interior plastics, for instance. The door pockets had become brittle with age and shattered like glass at the slightest impact. And that headliner. And the fuel door was plastic, too, when everyone else was still making them from sheet metal. Also, Volvo seems to have discovered biodegradable wiring insulation years before Mercedes used it on the W124, because on many of the wires under the hood, the insulation had turned chalky and brittle and simply fell off, leaving whole sections of wiring with bare copper strands. Fortunately, I never had a fire, but I had a bunch of little failures and non-working lights.
And the power locks had an evil trait: they’d inexplicably self-lock if you ever stepped out of the car with the engine running and then shut the door. Never under any other circumstances, mind you, like if you were sitting inside the car. But exit the car with the motor on and close the driver’s door and yes, they’d lock you out. This happened to me once, forcing me to break the rear passenger door window to get back in. I found a replacement window at the junkyard, and never made that mistake again. In fact, to this day, almost 30 years later, I always leave a window partly open if I ever get out of a car while it’s running.
But at least all the greasy parts worked like they should have. The engine was a tried and proven B230F, not powerful, but smooth and durable. The transmission was an Aisin-Warner 4-speed auto. I drove that car day in and day out for four years with no major problems. At one point, the rear bumper became loose. I discovered the mounting holes in the aluminum beam that constituted the bumper’s underlying construction had corroded and become enlarged. I believe the technical term is they had wallered out. I drilled some new holes in the soft aluminum and with a little bit of hardware it was as good as new. Also, just as Volvo beat Mercedes to biodegradable wiring, they were also apparently pioneers in the field of plastic radiator tanks, which eventually cracked around the outlets, causing leaks and overheating. Suck it, BMW, Volvo was there first!
One day I parked the Volvo in a small-town cemetery and hiked a short distance down a nearby creek to collect some samples for my master’s thesis. When I came back a couple hours later, the town’s cop was preparing to tow the Volvo, not because it was illegally parked, but because he thought it was abandoned. That was when I realized how bad it looked in others’ eyes.
I didn’t have it much longer, anyway. Another problem it had was a leaking rear main seal. I had to add about a quart of oil per month. I was also driving about 3,000 miles per month. To save money and time, I just…never changed the oil, figuring it was essentially changing itself continuously, all over Ohio’s roads and parking lots. This strategy served me well for 100,000 miles until I was driving one evening and the oil light came on. I just barely got pulled over to the shoulder when the engine seized. Maybe the oil filter was gummed up with age and the bypass failed? I don’t know what happened. Fortunately, I had foreseen some major fault like this coming and had already bought a cheap Dodge pickup, so I had a backup plan. Still, I was sad to see the Volvo die.
My backup plan. Photo credit: allpar.com
My earlier Volvo 240 DL had never had the kind of problems the 740GLE experienced. I assume all these years later that Volvo has grown into its big-boy pants and learned how to nail all aspects of premium car design and not just the mechanical.
Tempting, but…
I’ve occasionally looked at used Volvo 850 and 960 wagons, but my experience with some of the 740’s non-mechanical faults have made me hesitate. I know these cars have a following, but given that the price isn’t much different, I’d rather stick with the Germans.
It seems unfair to judge this particular car based on the non-maintenance, i.e. abuse, it received at the hands of its original owner. Kudos to any car that can log 250,000 miles under those circumstances. That said, a trusted mechanic I know, and one who has extensive experience with European cars, once told me the Volvo 940 was a 740 with “all the stupid engineered out.”
Maybe I didn’t make it clear enough that I felt that mechanically the car was first-rate, it was the non-moving and soft parts and plastic bits that seemed substandard, parts that should hold up more or less the same regardless of how a car is maintained.
My grandparents had a 1988 740 – not sure what trim level, but it wasn’t loaded as it had plastic hubcaps that had a tendency to fall off at random times. It was dark blue, and my grandmother loved that car – to this day she still remarks how easy it was to drive, and the tight turning radius. They must have worked all the bugs out by 1988, as it was still running like a top 11 years later when they traded it in. But Granny & Gramps took great care of their vehicles – the filing cabinet with service records was proof of that.
One funny story – my grandmother managed to lock her keys in the car by accident, and my grandfather wasn’t able to be reached (this was 1997, so no cell phones). She called the Manville NJ PD to bring a slim jim to unlock the car – cop rolls up, and exclaims “Oh no…not a Volvo!”. Unbeknownst to Granny, Volvo had found a way to foil the slim jim. End result was she had to borrow my great aunts 1990 Hyundai Excel to drive to the Volvo dealer and have a new key cut – we were howling with laugher seeing her drive the tiny Hyundai down the street…
That’s actually what happened to me. I had to break the glass after a cop responded and said his slim jim wouldn’t work.
Those ‘80’s Volvo plastic door pockets, I remember looking at one the wrong way on my Mom’s ‘86 240, and it shattered. The Volvo used parts place I went to pick up a replacement had piles of them and we picked the newest looking one. Oh, and this was when it was about 3 or 4 years old.
Wow. There are lots of things that could be said here about the somewhat woebegone 700 series Volvos, but it might be better to just have a moment of silence for a poor vehicle that managed to survive for a quarter of a million miles despite what seems like constant abuse its whole life.
By the way, not changing the oil filter (not to mention probably about 1/2 to a 1/4 of the total oil volume) for 100,000 miles most certainly played a role in the engine finally seizing. I’d put money on that.
Maybe my caffeine hasn’t hit yet, but I’m not getting the title. How exactly is this “years ahead of the Germans”?
It was a bit of snark aimed at the biodegradable wiring (years before M-B used it) and the disintegrating plastic radiator parts (years before BMW developed that reputation).
Ah, I wondered too until I came to the part of the story. A bit obscure.
Mark Jeanerette, understood about the plastic bits and I agree. My mother had a 1973 Volvo 144 with the pleated vinyl map pockets in the front doors. Over the ten years the car was in her possession they held up very well as did all the other interior soft, or semi-soft, stuff. Then she had a 1983 240 with the plastic “bins” on the front doors which did crack at some point during the 10 years she owned that car.
Normally in Texas (not on the coast however), sun does the damage to trim, paint, etc. While not as devastating to the functioning of an automobile as rust is where the roads are frequently salted it does detract from the vehicle’s appearance. Regarding the Volvo my mother owned, it was kept in a garage and meticulously maintained, including frequent cleaning, by my car-obsessed father. I guess the hard plastic in that car simply got old.
The 1976 245 I have came with the same pleated vinyl pockets that your mom’s 144 had. Since the car came from New Mexico, the sun – much like in TX – had done an job on the top part of the door cards (baking and bleaching them). When I installed a new set of door cards, from an early 1980s 240, those came with the plastic bins. At first, I was pleased to have those as they seemed useful…but ultimately, we wound up removing them as there was something about the design of those things that encouraged being pounded by ones feet every time you exited the car (driver or passenger doors). I think that yes, the plastic was and got brittle, but it was also a poor design on Volvo’s part. I can’t really speak to the situation in the 700 series, but odds are it was the same as in the 240s since much about the interior was the same.
I have a minty set of dark blue ones if anyone wants to make me an offer 😉
If I still had my 1980 242DL, I’d take you up on the offer for the dark blue door pockets — mine had the matching interior color!
Those pockets were poorly designed as you noted — they were directly in the path of one’s lower legs and feet when entering or exiting the car. I went through several on both sides over the 21 years I owned the car, but I was able to always score some undamaged replacements from junkyards. IIRC, all of the replacements were black or beige, so I spray painted them dark blue before installation.
I’m glad you were able to get another 100K miles out of the Volvo. Before I bought mine 12 years ago (a C30), I talked to several Volvo techs – they all told me Volvo’s can be nearly Toyota-level reliable as long as you follow the factory service recommendations religiously. I have and the C30 still runs great with zero problems.
A friend had a mid-80s 240 Wagon as his beater – ran perfect but the biodegradable wiring harness was doing its degrading thing – and it was one electrical gremlin after another – several resulting in stranding. He gave up on it shortly thereafter.
We had a 760GLE around the time I got my driver’s license. It was a nice car, but between years of very questionable maintenance and the same bad wiring, it was similarly troublesome to this car. I found several stripped bolt holes, including a few on the water pump where some hardware store bolts and nuts had been hacked into place. The biggest wiring issue I remember was in fuel pump circuit, causing it to cut out intermittently. I’m not sure how Mercedes missed this warning and made the same mistake, and it’s too bad because in both cases, most of the vehicles affected weren’t that bad. I always wonder if things like biodegradable wiring were an early move toward service life engineering, but Volvo and later Mercedes being some of the first to blunder into that horrible idea should be a counter-indication. With the mindless push to EVs that we don’t remotely have the infrastructure to power (and often aren’t practical even where it exists), it seems preserving cars like the earlier Volvos and Mercedes – cars built to last as long as humanly possible – should be a priority.
Besides the ’85 Buick Electra and Olds 98, the other car the Volvo 740 closely resembled in shape was the Dodge Dynasty, which had similar square-cut contours and a grille treatment that looked more like the Volvo’s than the GM cars did. Unlike those two, the Dodge (and similar Chrysler New Yorker) didn’t have the exceedingly low beltline that made both the 740 and the GM C bodies seem so airy you almost feel overexposed driving them. I recall my shoulders being well above the windowsill in the Volvo.
need a pic
The 700’s somehow had an elegance in their severity of styling that GM never managed – also, GM, super-square and gaudy doesn’t mix – but I have a vague, possibly false memory that Volvo were actually a bit shocked when the squared GM’s came out, as they thought their rectilinearity would be a bit of an upmarket USP.
Whilst I can’t really ever love a 200 series, they did have an uber-solid appeal to drive. The only 700 I’ve driven (a 740 wagon) was most disappointing in that regard. It felt no more or less creaky than its glassy thin-pillared look seem to imply, ie: quite a squeaker. Add in that rowdy old engine, and it felt fairly remote from being luxe.
The disintegration of your one seems a common tale for these, though as you’ve pointed out, the fundamentals weren’t deathly at all, and at 250K badly-maintained miles, that’s pretty impressive.