Hot Hatch… Volvo?

Secret Clandestine Car Enthusiast! 

Emily claims to “pretend to do car things” but comes from a family of Petrol heads. Listen to this episode to learn more, but also be sure to check out more from Emily, by visiting Garage Riot – the premiere social media platform for Car Enthusiasts.

• There’s a Volvo 480 Turbo taking up a parking spot
• The Volvo 480 Turbo at Radwood NJ

• COMING SOON

and much, much more!

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Gran Touring Motor Sports Podcast Break Fix, where we’re always fixing the break into something motor sports related.

Hey, everybody, crew, chief Eric here, and filling in for Brad tonight is my special guest, co-host crutch. Hi everyone. Luxury, sophistication, simplicity, and above all safety. Those are the adjectives you might use to describe our feature vehicle tonight. Mike, what are you on About? What else, Volvos? Excuse me.

What? What if I told you Volvo made a hot hatch? A Volvo? Only known to a few as the four 80. And what’s with us tonight to unpack this mystery car are my friends, Emily and Nate. Oh, a pleasure to meet you both. Welcome to Break Fix, Emily and Nate. Thanks for having us. Hi Eric. Hi Mike. All right, so let’s get into this.

Let’s talk about your vehicle history. Let’s drive to this Volvo. What we, let’s not run straight for it yet. So let, tell [00:01:00] us a little bit about your vehicle history. It took a quite a while for me to come kind of a car head. So in high school my parents had an old 1985 Toyota TCE Hatchback, I’m sorry, BA Baby Blue.

Uh, it was a really crappy car, but it was six shift. So I learned, learned on a six shift, which is nice. All my friends used to joke that it was, uh, the popemobile, cuz it’s a big, like, tall boxy thing. And the Pope vehicles are always like these big boxy, bulletproof glass things and you know, a joke about that.

Uh, so I had that. And then one day going to high school, the, uh, I think the front axle broke. Um, and, uh, we’re, we’re very accustomed to that around here. Um, and so the, the next car I got after that was a, oh goodness, it probably was a 1993 Ford escort wagon hatchback thing [00:02:00] like the, the Teal Green Ford escorts.

It’s a very, uh, common color, if you’re familiar with that genre of the Ford Escort. So that was good car. And then going off to college and needing my own car and not just one that I was borrowing from my parents, I ended up getting a, uh, 1990 Acura legend, uh, which is pretty cool. Uh, v6, also standard transmission.

Those cars are very sought after these days cuz there aren’t very many of them left. Yeah, I wish, I wish I still had it. Um, it was nice driving it home from work one day on 95 south and the timing belt went. Uh oh. So that, that kinda died a, a death after that. I had a really crappy Mazda protege. I’m starting, I’m starting to sense a theme here.

So, so my early, my early car history was basically any car that’s like $2,000 or less that I can just drive into the ground until it dies. And that pretty [00:03:00] much describes a lot of ’em. The, the protege was interesting in that at some point in my ownership, this was also, again, before I got into ma maintenance and taking care of cars on my own protege.

You see it pretty good. Gas mileage, about 30 miles per gallon. At some point. What I know now is the water pump started failing and I started losing coolant through the water bump and it, it kept, kept getting worse and worse. And at some point I was getting 30 miles per gallon of like water that I would, I would, I would go out to the car, put a gallon of water in the car, drive to work.

At, I’d have to have another jug in the trunk, uh, to top up to get home. And then at some point it just got so bad, it was like falling out as, as quick as I was born it in. Then I had a, uh, Volkswagen v r six Baat, I think it was a 90 95, the one that has no grill. Yeah. Um, it was a really cool car, but I [00:04:00] only owned it for seven days.

I, I bought it. You were all in Maryland. So, you know the, the Maryland Safety Inspection process, which is kind of rigorous and nitpicky. No, it’s not. So I, so I’m, I I, I looked at all the nitpicky things that they were gonna catch me on. I ended up, this is where I started to get a bit into cars. I ended up going to, uh, crazy Rays when they were still called Crazy Rays out in Hawkins.

Point one. Yeah. So I got some parts, was on my way home to go shower before going off to work. And I was going over the key bridge there, I guess on 6 95 A, uh, a waste management garbage truck, uh, on the crest of the bridge had just blown out its drive shaft. And it was sitting there in the middle of the road in front of me and I didn’t see it until I came up over the crest and there was a car on my left and, uh, KRA and the water on the rights.

Uh, so I drove right over it, uh, and [00:05:00] it caused the airbags to go off and it sheared part of the oil pan off and, uh, basically totaled the car. So that was fun. Um, but that’s kind of where my story with cheap cars ends Because of the accident with waste management, they were at fault. There was an insurance settlement, which gave me a, i, I think I paid about $1,400 for the, for the passats, and then they gave me about $3,000.

For the car, and then $5,000 pain and suffering. So I had a decent chunk of money to get a car. And here’s where I start getting into weird Swedish stuff. Aside from like Swedish metal. You bought a sob? I bought a sob, yes. God, how did I know? I grew up in New England, uh, in New Hampshire. My parents, uh, were still in New Hampshire at the time.

I was still, I was down here in Maryland. The sobs were very, were very popular up in New England. Yeah, I heard [00:06:00] you get your driver’s license and keys to AAB in the same day. I think they also knew a moose test or something. They like crashed a crash, a sob and do a moose or something. And they’re, and, and as crutch mentioned, Swedish and Volvos are notoriously safety minded.

So yeah, I got a SOB 95. Unfortunately it was GM era. It was a 2003 SOB 95 arc, so it was the v6. And it was, it was a turbo, but it was like super underpowered, low boost. It, it, it was a giant like beast of a, I think, old GM engine that they threw in there that had no, no room in the engine bay. And that car, I got it with like a hundred thousand miles on it.

It, it lasted pretty well. Um, I put like another a hundred thousand on it, but it, it always had like weird electronic issues. Like it would, wouldn’t want to start ev every once in a while. At one point I hit a deer in it being a sob. It survived. The [00:07:00] deer hit pretty well, but there, it, there must have been like a hairline crack in the radiator that the insurance company never caught When they, they, they replaced like the headlight and things.

So you were back to a gallon of water every day. So you were used to Yeah, almost. Yeah. So I had a friend who was more interested in cars and, uh, had more history than I had, and he and I talked to him. We’re like, yeah, we should try to fix it. Let’s try to replace the radiator. On our, on our, on our own, which on a normal car replacing a radiator’s, pretty simple.

On this sob it was a nightmare. The front grill, uh, area has this big metal lip that comes up over, and the, the radiator’s tucked way up under there, and then there’s the intake manifold and like some turbo pipes and stuff all in the way. So you have to like, disassemble half of the front of the engine to be able to get the radiator to be able to pull it towards the engine and up and out.

It, it was a disaster. It, it took two days, but I did, I did get it done. That was interesting. Um, and that, [00:08:00] that was kind of my real first foray into doing anything other than like an oil change, uh, or, or breaks on a car. Let’s pause there, as Emily has been patiently waiting and I hear that you have a history and of your family history of being petrolhead.

So let’s, let’s talk about that and unpack a little bit. Oh, geez. Uh, Christ, you’ve been talking to my mom way too much. Yes, I have. So my parents are both retired navy and they’re very much into muscle cars. So I’ve been around muscle cars for a while. Um, my mom loves ’em, my dad loves ’em. Like American muscle has been like what I was kind of born and raised with, which is really strange.

So my very first car was a 96 Zuzu Rodeo and it was black and it was lifted and had mudding tires on it. It was. It was a very redneck country, which was fabulous. I mean like if you come from an American muscle car family, you have to have redneck country cars as [00:09:00] well. But I loved it. It was a wonderful car.

It was a stick shift. So I learned how to drive a stick. I actually learned how to drive a stick in my mom’s little tiny blue Nissan truck, and I still remember her yelling at me. Don’t squish the shampoo bottle when you shift. Cause we had just come back from hair salon. So I loved that car. I was not working on cars myself at that time.

I still remember my dad writing and like paint pen on the battery, like make sure you’re putting water in the battery so it runs and like this is the positive and this is the negative. I also changed the spark plugs on that like myself once. That was an accomplishment for me. I did take it to a place that does oil changes and being really young and very naive.

At the time, they were like, oh, well you have to change your transmission fluid. We have to change all this stuff. I’m like, okay. Because I just had got in the car, didn’t know that much about it. They ended up draining all of the oil out of the engine and not putting it back in. So I was on my way to [00:10:00] college on 50, headed to two cause I was gonna, Anne Arundo Community College at the time and the entire engine decided to, uh, weld the self together on the bridge.

That’s a good way to, during rush hour traffic. And then, After that ensued like a four week battle over my poor rodeo about who was going to get to do work on it. Cause I had it towed to my shop and then that the oil place decided to have it towed overnight to theirs and I had it towed back and we went back and forth for a while.

Eventually I got a new clutch, I got a new transmission, I got a lot of new stuff and it worked out really great. And then I made a really dumb decision to trade it in so my significant other at the time could get a new car. And then I inherited my parents’ Mitsubishi Dia Monte, which was a 2001, which are lovely cars unless you ever have to change the brakes or the rotors on them.

And if you do, you have to do it every six months because they’re crap and it’s [00:11:00] very expensive. So I eventually got rid of that car cuz it was just too much. The value of the car wasn’t in it for every time I had to get new brakes and new rotors. After that I borrowed a car from someone. It was a horrible little tiny white car, but it drove.

I actually happened to take it to work one day when my house had flooded, so I saved the car from a flood. After that, I got a 2003 Volkswagen Passat, which at the time I didn’t know, had significant electrical failures. It’s German, uh, Well, yeah, like remember young, naive, I’m still kind of young and naive with cars.

Well, no, you’re talking to people that the three of us own Volkswagens, so we know the Germans have electrical problems. We just don’t care. So it’s a given. If the check engine light is not on, there is a problem. The car’s broken. It’s burned out. Well, I took it to a German [00:12:00] mechanic who is like, you have a problem with your ecu.

It needs to be replaced, but it might not be that. It might be this other thing. And I’m like, well, I don’t have that kind of money right now. I’ll just get a new car. And as I was on my way, To go get the new car in Virginia that I already had a loan for. It was just for this car. The entire um, power on the vehicle failed on 4 95 and I was able to get it off onto an exit ramp and it was like 95 degrees outside and I couldn’t get the windows to go down it.

It was a very bad experience, so I had to get my parents to get a vehicle to tow that one to a junkyard, get rid of the title, and then figure out how to go buy the car that I was supposed to get. So I ended up getting a 2016 Hyundai accent cuz it was affordable. It was super cheap and it had an undisclosed front end collision, which I’m pretty sure my, my current Passat has the same cuz there’s overspray all over the place on the front end of [00:13:00] that car.

Well see. It wasn’t the overspray that gave it away, it was the inside wheel liner was missing. So I was like, oh, that’s a little weird. And then I, I went to replace it and then I found a tire rub and then over time I’ve started to notice other problems. We actually just did the brakes and the rotors on it and found out the rotors were warped.

Not horribly, but bad enough that it would, you could feel it pulse when you were braking. So I still drive that car cuz I, I was gonna say the, the indicator for me would’ve been the white bumper and hood and the rest of the car was fuchsia. But you know, they, whatever. No, it’s all, it’s all the same color.

They did a good job painting it. But that’s, that’s kind of my car history. I still like American muscle cars. My parents have a G T O and my dad used to have Catalina. Um, I took the Catalina to prom actually when I was in high school, so a convertible Catalina, a convertible Catalina. That thing drove like a glorious boat.

It’s wonderful. But what our listeners may not know is you’re a blogger for Garage Riot, which we’ll talk about in a little [00:14:00] bit. So you, I think you’re being a little bit modest in terms of your car aficionado status, and I think you’re more of a, like a secret clandestine car enthusiast. Right. So Emily, we mentioned earlier that you blog for Garage Riot and we recently established a partnership with them.

And so in my understanding, you’ve been with them for a very long time and I hear your member number is quite low. So I wanted to get a perspective from you on what it’s like, what it’s about and and why you joined. Yeah, so I actually joined Garage Ride. It was our first time at the Vintage. They usually have like a, a pre vintage party and they, it was Donovan and one of the other guys, Andy, they had a booth and nobody was going up to them.

And I had just come off of a major recruiting trip, so I was still very friendly and outgoing with people. I approached them, they were like, we’re giving away stuff. I’m like, oh, you mean you’re just going to give it to me? And they’re like, no, you have to enter and join online. So I, I ended up joining online cause I [00:15:00] was trying to get into cars at the time.

We were still dating and like I started hanging out in, um, garage Riot. It was small social media platform for car enthusiasts and there was like a couple of members, I think there were less than 20 at the time that I had joined. It was nice because I got to start reading articles about cars. Like I, I started learning about cars, learning about Formula One racing.

There was a lot of, uh, cultural aspects of car ownership. Some of the stuff that I, I’ve talked to Donovan and the rest of the folks on the channel about is like women in cars and like that aspect of the industry and what does that look like. And so they, they’re good at pulling in articles. There’s quite a few female members within Garage Riot that, that talk about their experience with cars and some of the stuff that they do.

Some of them work on them, some of ’em just like staring at them and driving them, which is totally cool as well. But it’s a community of car enthusiasts. People that either just buy cars and take them to shops and get the fixed or do the work [00:16:00] themselves. And think of it like, not necessarily Facebook for car people, but more like the Facebook and any other social media platform for them.

And they’ve got a presence on a couple of other sites, but they allow, uh, members to write articles and share them, have photo galleries, engaging discussions. There’s vendors on there as well. So if you’re looking for coupons, they have a, a nice hookup with vendors. They’ll post coupons for a couple of the sites as well.

It’s a good community. I, the folks on there are very friendly, they’re very open. They ask questions. They’re engaging. We post bad videos of car crashes. It’s very welcoming. They’re doing a lot of changes to the site. So I, I had talked to Donovan and Company, uh, about a year and a half ago. It feels like, about a potential new project that they could embark on.

So I’m hoping sometime soon that they will have it. That should make, uh, managing your mods to your cars a lot easier. But they, they’ve got a bunch of coming changes in the. It’s a great community to be a part of. Very cool. And we’ve enjoyed the time we’ve been [00:17:00] spending with the team from Garage Riot, so we’re looking forward to expanding that partnership and doing some crossover episodes with them as well.

So that’s also a discussion, but I think we’ve now gotten to the point where we need to talk about this mystery Volvo that, you know, two people on this planet know about. And we’re talking to ’em right now. So how do we get to this Volvo four 80? When did this happen and how did it happen and, and why? Um, well, I, I’ll start, I have the luxury of working in a place that allows me to do travel and learn about new technology that’s going on.

So I had the opportunity to go to a conference overseas and he decided to tag along and go explore the Swedish countryside while I was in Denmark. Let’s be fair, he had spent probably about two months before this trip researching Volvo four eighties and reminding me every single day, like I’ve always wanted a Volvo for.

Boys wanted one. Wait, wait. So let’s unpack that. Yeah. How did you [00:18:00] find the thing in the first place? Because I, I mean, when Crutch brought it to my attention, I was like, wait, what? Excuse me. It’s a hatchback. I mean, you think hatchback Volvo and you’re thinking, you know, C 30, right? And that’s pretty modern, which they kind of styled it after a, a couple of Italian cars.

That’s the front end of the S 40. Stuff like that. There’s certain Volvos that people know, you know, the shit Brown 800 series from the eighties, you know, diesel two forties, you know, those kinds of things. Yeah, the eight 50 Turbo. Turbo. Yeah. The Turbo Bricks, the eight 50 sedans, the V 70 s, XC 90 s. You know, everybody knows these cars.

And then obviously if you’re an old schooler like I am and you like classic cars, the P 1800 is like the car. It is the Volvo. Beautiful. And I happen to be a fan of the C 70 and there’s a whole backstory with Audi on that one, but we’ll save that for another time. But the four 80, it’s not something that you go, you know, when you’re talking about cars with your friends over a beer, you go, yeah, the four 80, the what?

It’s not a car that comes up in conversation. [00:19:00] So how do we get there? So, uh, so certainly I’m kind of a quirky person. I mean, I’ve got, I’ve got no and no, no drains and things like that. So I, I’ve always had somewhat quirky tastes to rewind a little bit after my horrible experience working on a, so I was interested in, in, in working more on cars.

So I’m like, I, I need a fun car to, to, to learn on My requirements were it needed to be cheap. Like under a thousand bucks. Cause I didn’t have much money. It needed to be 20 years old or older. So it would be exempt from like Maryland safety and inspection stuff. Uh, so it could qualify as a historic car and it needed to be kind of simple.

So no, no OBD two, no computers, none of that. So I actually ended up finding a Volvo, Amazon for 750 bucks in Catonsville that didn’t run, that I bought. And then, uh, got trailered to my house. You still have it? And then, and has it ever run? It has run well, the engine has run, it has not moved, it has moved on its own power at some, at [00:20:00] one point.

Like gravity, but it did not stop on its own power. And then that’s where I got stuck because like as I dove into the brakes, I found a bunch of rusts and then the rear brakes were drum breaks. I’m trying to pop the rear drum break off. When I popped it off, it cracked the hub and it was just one thing after another.

And like, they don’t sell parts for some of these things. So like, finding replacement parts became problematic. And so instead of replacing the drum, I found a whole nother rear axle. But that’s a, that’s a whole nother story. But getting into the Volvo, Volvo, Amazons, I started getting that appreciation for cars like the P 1800, cuz I came across those after I got the Volvo.

Volvo, Amazon. And was researching more of the history of Volvos around that time. I was actually on a work trip in Germany at one point and I was walking around the town and came across it a white four 80 in Germany there and I’m like, oh, that’s a really cool looking 80 style, like straight lines and everything.

[00:21:00] And I remembered it at that point in time. And when Emily and I were going to Denmark and I’m like, okay, well I should look for cool cars in the area while, while I’m in Denmark on vacation. There was no cool cars. It was, I should look for Volvo for 80 while we’re on vacation. But wait, let me look at it before we go on vacation.

It was, it was always in the back of my mind as a cool car that was never sold in the us. Slightly, slightly obsessed only, only a little. What do you think about this one, honey? Does this look good? What about this one? I don’t know. I still like this one. That was almost every day for two months. There had to have been a conversation in there that goes, oh, look, it’s rare in this color.

No, no. The rarity was not a thing. It was about whether or not the finish was good, how the interior looked. Did it have the original parts on it? Um, was the interior 1980s enough? I think we had that conversation as well. Do they have like pastel stripes in the seats on some of them? Oh, yes. [00:22:00] Yeah. Mine has like, it’s, it’s like a velo cloth interior.

It reminds you of a Greyhound bus, rainbow, rainbow like stripes, Greyhound bus. You, you know, you just, you just put a thought in my head, you know, when you say, is it eighties enough? I mean, you went all the way to Denmark to find this car when you could have probably gone down to a used car lot in DC and picked yourself up in IROC Camaro, which screams 1984.

Right? He has the wrong hair. So unlike Emily, I, I don’t have any sort of love for American muscle cars. My parents were not car heads, so I didn’t get anything from, I didn’t inherit any of that from them. It’s like European cars and eighties. IRO is not a muscle car, Malaysia, it’s not a muscle car, just it’s just a car.

I guess maybe the clarification is I’ve never really liked American cars. All right. This one’s special too. So for our listeners out there, here [00:23:00] we are. Picture yourself, Denmark, 2000 something, right? I feel like 18. I feel like we’re having a golden girls moment here. But what people don’t realize, Volvo has changed hands over the years, right?

It’s original ownership being built based in Sweden, et cetera. Ford bought them. Now they’re owned by Tata. They’ve changed hands a couple times in between there, but a lot of cars were built in Sweden for the general EU market, except for the four 80, which was built in Holland and is comprised of a lot of French parts, which has its own issues and in its own right.

So here we are. We’re lusting after this four 80. You’re in Denmark. And black is best, which I’ve, I’ve seen pictures of this car. So how do you get it back? So I have done a lot of research. I found one online looking at all the European car sites, and I arranged to meet this guy who was selling it. He owned a, a small little classic car shop in Sweden.

Uh, so it was about two hours away from Denmark. Uh, so she went off to her conference in the [00:24:00] morning. I get on a train, I go up to to Sweden across the, the water and go to, uh, a small little town up there. Then have to get on a bus to get to the car shop, and then have to walk about half a mile, but eventually get there.

And this guy’s got this really eclectic collection of old European cars. He’s got an old Mercedes-Benz. He’s got a Reno, like four cv. He’s got a a Morris or an Austin minor, 1100 or something like that. He’s got an old bmw and then he’s got this. Volvo four 80 Turbo. He didn’t speak very much English, but he had a friend who did.

Uh, so he called his friend over. His friend drove over, and then his friend and I got in the car and went, went for a test drive, drove it around for, uh, 20 minutes or so, brought it back. He had a lift in his shop. So I was able to actually get it up on a lift to take a look at the underside of the car, which is nice.

Check out the, the quality of the condition of rust and things like that. Are those bodies galvanized? Are, are you have to [00:25:00] worry about rust a lot on those? I, I think so. I, I think I need to worry about rust. Okay. Especially being a Swedish car and, and having snow and stuff up there. It checked out and the, the price was pretty good.

It was about, it was only about $4,000 American, uh, after, after the, you are breaking that budget, aren’t you? But there was a few problems. So I was there in May of 2018. Yeah. In Sweden, yet the car was produced November, in November of 1993. And so it wasn’t yet 25 years old to be able to be imported based on the 25 year d o t import loss.

And that’s at the tail end of the four production run, if I remember correctly. Yeah. Grand in 95. So this was manufactured November, 1993. I was there in May, so it wasn’t 25 years old until November. Until November. So Bill in 93, was it sold as a [00:26:00] 94? No, it was sold as a 93. Okay. But the problem is the d o t laws for the 25 year rule are based on the production date, not the model year.

So I read to buy it and thankfully, uh, the, the seller said he could just hold onto it for, for six months. So I, I read to buy it. Uh, we signed a contract. I wired him the money through a cool app called TransferWise, which does kind of foreign currency conversion and easy money transfers. And then we came home and had to figure out how to get a, and then I had six months to try to figure out how the hell am I gonna get a car that I bought in Sweden to the US Cause I’ve never done that before.

And like none of this process is really all that well documented anywhere. We spent probably like four months. Researching like vehicle import services. We got to a point where we were talking about, well, maybe we can buy another car and put them both in a container and have the, have the entire container come over, or how many cars can we fit in a container to bring it over to [00:27:00] get the most value.

When you say cars, you mean another four 80 for spare parts? That was actually, that was actually in my mind because like it’s in hers. Getting, getting parts is awful and like, it’d be nice to have like a parts car I could just seal off of if I need it or, or my own, but Okay. No, no. Well, we’ll get, we’ll get, we’ll get to that though, so it would be nice to have one to like keep original.

And period. Correct. And then one to like play with modify and play with. Yeah. But so we, we spent like four months trying to find places and the quotes that we were getting were ridiculously astronomical. And he’s a part of, and I think I’m a part of the group now, um, a BMW group on Facebook. Right. It was BMW and it was the vintage.

Yeah, the vintage. Um, and he just decided to push on the question, I have car, how do I get it to the states? And like, what were all the responses? It was like one person, this is the person that you go to like, like half a dozen or, or more people all replied with the same person. [00:28:00] So they’ve all, they’ve all used this guy in the past.

Hans Gruber. Yeah. We know a guy. It was, it was essentially that we know a guy, everybody knew a guy. They’ve all in the B M W community used him. Um, he was well known in, uh, importing like e uh, E 28. And things like that. And, uh, so I contacted that, contacted that guy and he seemed, uh, really reasonable to work with.

Uh, it was a little touch and shady, shady at the beginning because Shady, it was shady the whole way. It was super shady because like between contacting him and like occasionally hearing back from, there was no conversation of cost. We were just moving full on, full steam ahead with getting this car. No conversation about costs.

Well, I, I brought up cost in every single interaction with him. It’s just, he never answered those questions. You are in good Hans with Hans. All right. But like, he is like, yeah, I can do that. And like, he [00:29:00] sent a, a guy with a tow truck all the way. So this guy, this importer base in the Netherlands, the car is out in Sweden.

He sent a guy with a tow truck all the way out to Sweden to pick up the car on my behalf to tow truck it like a thousand kilometers back to the Netherlands. The battery was said when they got it. He replaced the battery for me. He did all the cleaning and everything he needed to do to ship a car. Sent pictures of the whole thing, sent pictures of all the stuff right.

Right before I was about to get on a ship, he emailed me the bill, which was. Thankfully very reasonable. I was, I was worried because up to that point he had gone all the way to get my car. He had the car in his possession, he had all the paperwork about the car. We were starting to worry whether or not there would be white powder in the vehicle when we got it out of port or if he would try to hold the car ransom.

But, um, no, he was completely professional at the end. Very reasonable in terms of cost. And then, uh, uh, he, he put it on a boat in the Netherlands. It shipped to the Baltimore port. I think it shipped at the [00:30:00] end of November, or beginning of December of 2018. And it showed up like the day before. New Year’s took about a month when I got the actual notification from the shipping company in the US that it was ready for pickup.

Then you’re faced with another challenge. So you got this car now in, in the port of Baltimore, and it’s a car that won’t be in Maryland’s DMV database because it was not a car that was built nor manufactured for the us. So where do you go from here? And Bernie, like Nate said that uh, the process for bringing in cards like this are, is very much undocumented, not really much of anywhere.

And there, even when you go through, like we got it to the port, there’s no documentation for how you get it out of port. Really. You kind of have to like call around and ask questions. So there’s another guy that knows a guy. Yeah. Yeah. I needed another guy. Uh, that was, that was interesting to get it off of port.

You can’t just. Drive on there with a normal tow truck or, uh, with a trailer or anything like that. Now in my benefit, I did have a, uh, a CAT card being a former government [00:31:00] employee, so I, I was able to get on base with my CAT card. Otherwise, you need to be escorted while you’re, um, on the port grounds.

Otherwise, you need to be escorted by somebody with a TWI card, a transport worker identification card. Uh, normal civilians, normal people can’t just drive onto the porch by themselves while you’re around. Uh, they have to be escorted. And except in my case, uh, having, uh, a government id, the shipping company just said, go to trailer number, whatever.

And so I, I find that trailer on the, on the port property. I drive up there. Apparently I was supposed to have been wearing like a high vis vest cuz they have all these signs that say you must wear a high vis vest. And I wasn’t. They were, your hair wasn’t enough. May, maybe that’s how I got away with it. I don’t know.

But I, I went up there, I had the shipper had emailed me copies of the import certification and some of those forms that were necessary. I showed them to the, the folks at the trailer and they said, gimme five minutes, I’ll have somebody drive it out. And then they [00:32:00] drove the car out of their, uh, of their lots and, and then I had the car, but then I, then I needed to get the car home.

Uh, cuz I can’t just drive it cuz it’s got no plates or anything like that. Probably could have, and not just any tow truck driver can just drive onto the, onto the port property and, and tow it home. So I needed somebody with a. A TWI license who was also a tow driver. Thankfully, one of the, uh, companies that I called had somebody who didn’t work for them, who was a friend of theirs, who had a TWI card, who happened to have a trailer.

So that guy eventually showed up like an hour later, we got it loaded and came home, and we drove it down the driveway. And it sat for, what, almost a month, two weeks to a month before we, we got the No, no, I, I have the paperwork right away. I think like the next day or later that week, we went to the mva.

So later that week or the next day comment is we had to spend several hours translating Swedish English. And finding the right parts of the [00:33:00] form that Maryland would care about, because you can’t just go to the nba, like you said, with this car that’s not gonna be in their records. You have to, you basically have to do their job for them and just make it as easy as possible so they could just like type in or punch in the right information.

So we, it was certainly like government bureaucracy at its finest. Um, so leading up to all this, we, we had done a lot of research about the process, so I, I felt like I, I knew the process fairly well about what the steps were and what I needed to do. The Maryland import process says that if you have a title or registration that’s in another foreign language Oh yeah.

That you need to have it trans, you can’t just translate it on your own. Yeah. You need to have it translated by the embassy. By an embassy from the country of origin. So I call the Swedish Embassy in DC. I’m like, Hey, I have a car title that’s from Sweden that I would like you to trans, uh, [00:34:00] translate for me.

And like on official, like embassy letterhead or whatever. Because they, like it needed to be official from the embassy. And they’re like, no, we don’t do that. Call somebody else. We don’t, we we don’t do that. So I was stuck with, okay, what the heck, Marilyn Law says you gotta do this. And then the embassy says, no, they don’t do that.

So we essentially did our best. We went to Google Translate, looked at all the fields and said, oh, that’s, that’s odometer. Yeah, that’s like make and model. And we kind of like translated ourselves on a separate document. To be clear, we both have like some exposure to foreign languages. So like it was slightly easier in that we, we can understand based off of other languages.

We know what they were getting at, but it was still painful. We’re talking about like, Small text fields with mobile phones trying to scan and figure out what it’s actually saying. But eventually we got it and he had all the paperwork and he went to the mba. And you were there, what, almost two hours, two or three hours, right.

Two [00:35:00] or three hours walking through the per person at the desk. This is where I need you to put this in your database and this is the next forum that you need to fill out. And I put them in order for you. The, the wait time wasn’t three hours of telling ’em that it was the normal, like two and a half hour wait at the mba?

Yeah. Plus 30 minutes of doing the actual thing. But of course they don’t get this often. They don’t get somebody who walks in with a weird Volvo with a weird title that’s in Swedish, but they have a desk devoted to it. I’ve been to the Lober nba, I’ve seen the, the gray market titled desk that’s like off in the corner.

Yeah. But he had all the boxes checked. Swedish imported historic tags. That haircut. I mean, it was just like they didn’t know what to do with them. So I, I think because I went in there kind of knowledgeable of the process, kind of like determined and sure of myself, I, I really [00:36:00] felt like I knew way more about the Maryland import process than the, than the poor lady behind the counter did.

Because she kept telling me like, oh, well we, uh, we need a title. And in my case, I didn’t actually have a title because Sweden doesn’t have titles. They just have registration certificates. And so they’re, they’re somewhere in the Maryland policy that says if you have a foreign vehicle and it doesn’t have a title, then you need registration and something else.

And so, or bill of sale and registration certificate or something like that. So I had those, I knew the law, I was able to explain to her what she needed to do, and we were able to eventually get through it all. And she, she didn’t trip up on the, uh, not having a official translation from the Swedish Embassy thing.

So she was very patient with me walking through my Google translated version of, of the registration through the vehicle. Did you also find it a challenge to get this car insured? So are you going through normal insurance? Are you doing like a Haggerty specialty car insurance? What do you, what do you have to do there for what we [00:37:00] would consider a gray market card?

Yeah. So I, I didn’t even try to go through normal insurance cause I didn’t know of one, how they would handle it at all. And two, like certainly if they were to handle it, I don’t think they would give it much value in terms of replacement or, or damage or repair or anything like that. So, given the number of cars that we had at the time, uh, I looked into Haggerty, um, and we’re gone.

We, we have Haggerty now and I have the, the E 30 Yeah. On the Haggerty plan as well as the four eight. Nice. Now, so I’ve got those two. With Haggerty and I have got the rest of the cars, so we kind more daily drive on, on just normal furniture. Yeah, it worked out well. We got it licensed and well, we got it tagged in.

But yeah, three, three nervous hours sitting at the nba wondering if I’m gonna be able to leave with Marilyn plates and a Maryland title. Got that. And I did. And it was, it was a very happy, successful day until he brought it home and decided to try to put plates on it and then found out that the US tags are [00:38:00] ugly on European cars.

I hate, clearly needed to have a European style plate on our car. I, I really like in Europe how, um, you can get American size plates if you’re in Europe for American cars. Like they, they have kind of that dual size thing, but we don’t do that in the US and I really think we, so, so I have to ask, did you do what all the stands froze?

Do and buy the Stretched Out Maryland tag that has the Maryland tag printed on it, but it’s changed. Into the European format. That’s about it. I, I, I really considered that, but decided if you were going to spend the money on a Euros sized tag, we should make it fun, which is why it doesn’t have that. Yeah, so we, we, we ended up going to a few car shows with the soup and Maryland tags on the front.

The poking out like a, and took them off like, like a buck tooth on, on like a beaver or something. That’s exactly what it looks like, like a bmwm four. [00:39:00] And then I decided what I really need is like show plates. So I ended up getting some bank Euro plates that say, uh, daft Punk. Well, DAF or Daft Punk. Sorry.

Oh crap. You ruined it. So, so I got some fake European plates that say Daft Punk because, uh, a as you mentioned about the, a bit about the history of the four 80, it was built in Holland, in the Netherlands. At what was previously the old DAF factory, we actually talked about Daft Vans on another episode, so we’re actually quite familiar.

So it’s, it’s kind of this Volvo car that’s built in the Netherlands, so it’s kind of a punk. And then Daft Punk being a French band kind of gives its ties to its, uh, French breeds, uh, with, uh, the Reno engine and the Reno Drive train and everything. We’ve talked about some of your early challenges with the car, and you kind of dabbled a little bit here in the tech specs.

Let’s deeper dive into the tech specs of the car, because most people aren’t gonna know really what it is, and [00:40:00] you’ve alluded to some of it, but let, let’s explore that a little bit. It was a, uh, unique car for Volvo in a, in a few regards. It was their first front wheel drive car. It’s a front wheel drive, 1.7 liter, uh, in line for turbo.

In my case, it’s a 1993. Volvo four 80 Turbo Transverse, correct? Yes. It’s in their sideways. Yep. And, uh, it’s, it’s a fairly light car. It weighs about 2200 pounds. The 1.7 liter turbo gets about 120 horsepower at the crank stock. Uh, 129 pound feet of torque. So, rumor was that when it was being developed, cuz it’s kind of this weird mishmash of Volvo and Reno parts.

They actually supposedly sent the engine in the car to Porsche to do tuning. It actually has like a, a Porsche throttle body on it. And supposedly the rumor is that Porsche tuned it up to about 170 horsepower. And then when they gave it back to Volvo Hole was [00:41:00] like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute. We’re we’re kind of a safety family company here.

Can you detune em a little? So that’s how it ended up. Rumor, uh, at least, uh, down at about 120 horsepower. But that meant that the engine, uh, and, and booths and things were capable of getting up to that higher horsepower. So there’s actually, uh, some folks still in the, in the Volvo four 80 community that I found on, on Facebook and in European forums that do modifications of the ECU to actually restore some of that original kind of fuel map and things, and up the boosts.

Supposedly, that’s supposed to give you about 150 horsepower. Um, at the wheels, but I have not ded it or anything like, like that. And I’m pretty sure my clutch is at its last legs. Cause uh, when I do get high on boost, I can, I can feel and smell the clutch slipping high on boost. That’s like five pounds in Volvo Peak, right?

Uh, I. I, I, I think the stock boost [00:42:00] is about seven or eight pounds. Yeah. With the, the modified ecu, uh, that I actually have, I actually ordered, I got one from one of the folks on, on one of the forums. It goes all the way up to 14. Oh, wow. And, and what are we running our workforce? Pretty big difference. 1920.

Yeah. Something like that when they’re modd. But, you know, stock boost on the, on the original K with three s is only eight or nine pounds. It’s nothing. Yeah. So, so being a fairly light car with that kind of power, it’s, it’s actually a really fun puppy car to drive. Nice. Well, yeah, and, and the power to weight ratio is what really comes into play there.

And that’s normal for cars of that era. Right. They didn’t really start getting heavy. Until the late nineties when they started introducing things like ProCon 10, a lot more of the airbags and all these more, you know, advanced crush zones and things like that. The cars of the eighties and early nineties were still built the old way, you know, they’re economical, they’re super lightweight in comparison, that’s heavier than a Chico, but it’s still lighter than an Audi coop, which weighed in at about 2,400 pounds and it’s a [00:43:00] much larger car.

But all those cars with that air, it’s like, man, if you were above 2,500 pounds, it was a tank. Yeah. Cars, like you said back then, you could see out of them so much more easily. Like the, the A pillars and everything were smaller, thin, which is great until you roll over. Yeah. I think my, my year is actually the last year before they added airbags, so I think they added airbags in in 94.

Which I often have to remind him about whenever we go have fun in the country with the four 80, I mean, you know, our track cars, most of us, for those of us who even keep them street legal, the airbags are gone. Yeah. For the most part, becau because, you know, especially the Volkswagens, the, the stock steering wheel is like a ship wheel.

Well, that, that, and if they were made by Tada, they didn’t work in the first place, so it doesn’t really matter, well then they’re claymores, not airbags. So, you know, the four 80 styling wise, it’s definitely an acquired taste. It reminds me of a couple dust buster. Well, yeah, it reminds you of a couple of other [00:44:00] cars, but I gotta give it.

Matt profs are having popup headlights cuz that is period appropriate. You know, you look at some of the design cues, it really still looks pretty modern. I like the fact, you know, we have one here in the background. It’s got that little, you know, kind of wing up over the hatchback glass and this one in particular has wheels on it, whatever.

But it also reminds me of some of the Mitsubishis of the period. Like if I look at it with one eye crossed and I’m half drunk, it reminds me of the stereo on a little bit like it, like a miniature version of it. So I can see design cues from other cars, but the question is, Who actually designed it? Did Volvo design it or did like Barona have their, their hands involved?

Who was involved in designing the, the four 80? I’m gonna kick myself cuz I, I, I do know the person’s name but I can’t remember it. Um, I believe it was somebody from Volvo. I think it’s John DeVries is the stylist who did it back to, uh, the popup headlights. That was, that was another, uh, unique characteristic of the four 80, especially for Volvo.

It was the [00:45:00] first and only Volvo to ever have popup headlights. And, and the interesting thing about that is they did that to meet American safety laws at the time in the eighties cuz headlights had to be a certain height off the ground. And they were planning on actually selling the four 80 in the US to compete with all the other hatchbacks and hot hatches starting around that time in the late eighties.

Uh, unfortunately it turned out that the economy and can exchange rate with the US didn didn’t work out in Volvo favor. And they, they scrapped plants to bring it to the us. How big is the four 80? Let’s talk about like wheel base and overall length. It’s not big. It’s tiny. It’s so small. It’s It’s really small.

How’s it compared to your E 30? Cuz E 30 is something a lot. Exactly. It’s smaller than the E 30. It’s definitely shorter in length than the E 30 by, it’s narrower too, by a good distance. I would say it’s narrower by like what, six inches? It’s not much. It’s just enough. So, so you’re saying it’s not a car for Brad or eye?

Nope. [00:46:00] Um, I, I don’t know. It’s actually quite roomy. There’s a lot of leg room. I’ve been told that it’s actually a very good car for tall people. It’s because of how, how the seats are. They’re what bucket seats in the front, right? They’re bucket, yeah. It’s, it’s a two by two. And so they’re, it’s got bucket seats.

But the way that the seats are positioned is it, it’s very much that you’re very leaned back. It reminds me of probably closer to like a, a modern race car where you’re, you’re leaned back, you’re kind of stretched out a little bit. And then, so there’s a, there’s a lot of room and you don’t have a lot of the obstructions that you get with modern cars.

Um, like you don’t have this big console in the middle taking up a ton of space. You don’t have a huge armrest. And the door and the armrest is very narrow. There’s a lot of good room on the inside of the car. The, the two plus two layout is really interesting cuz the back seats are also bucket seats and they’re really comfortable.

It’s still pretty tight in the back. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a coop, [00:47:00] so the back is kind of small, but it’s, it’s much more rear leg room. Yeah. I, I can comfortably sit back there. Probably not for a long. A, a really long time, but Doug, Doug de Morro can certainly do his, get in the backseat tests and probably fits.

So it bangs the question then what’s it like to drive? I wouldn’t know because I’m not allowed to drive it yet. You’ve had it for two years and yet you can’t drive it yet. Shots fired. Shots fired. I’m just kidding. The only car of his besides the XC 90 that I’ve been allowed to drive was the E 30 and the first time I drove, that was the first time I drove a stick in almost.

15 years and we were on a mountain in the dark in a huge fog bank While it was what? Raining? Uh, it was certainly horrifying. Percent fog. I’ll say you actually blogged about that experience. I know you blogged about that one because I’ve actually read that post. Yeah, the photo is scary. You have not seen it.

[00:48:00] There’s nothing but clouds. Is that Skyline Drive? That was Skyline Drive. Oh, that’s a wonderful road. You were everywhere. Like you could see their beadie little eyes along the side of the road waiting to jump out at you. Well, I, I had driven the, we, we had gone down to North Carolina and Asheville for the, the B M W show.

Vintage. The vintage, and I had driven all the way down and I had, I had promised her that I’d let her drive on the way back. And then on the way back it happened to be super shitty weather with like almost complete fog. But I drove really well. And I didn’t ruin the clutch. It was the first time I learned about engine racing.

I didn’t know that was a thing at the time. I was all proud of myself and I still haven’t driven the four 80 yet. I will say the other reason you haven’t driven most of Nate’s cars is cuz a lot of ’em don’t move. That’s true. Also true. I have probably pushed his cars further by myself than I would driven them, but the four 80 that’s got some fun stories too.

[00:49:00] Well, well, yeah. So go, go ahead. So, oh gosh, where were we? We had mentioned the E 34. That front that helped me. Trailer, right. So I had, I had posed a question cuz I was kind of following my, my, my train of thought here. What’s it like to drive? Right. That was, that was my question. We kind of segued from there, you know, went to New Jersey and back.

So now we’re back. So what’s the four 80 like to drive fun of? Of all the cars that I currently own, and we haven’t gotten through all of them yet, but of the cars they currently own. I think the four 80 is actually one of the best cars, if not the funnest car to drive because it’s just so light and nimble.

And handles well. Handles well. Like the steering is, is responsive, really responsive. And that would be a car with no nannies and no assist. Like you said, it’s probably an O B D one car. If not, it’s a Medtronic car. It’s somewhere on the border there. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s Medtronic. Okay. Um, definitely doesn’t have any O B [00:50:00] D ports or anything on it.

Yeah, it helps the road really well, especially around the corners. No abs. It should have power steering. Actually it does have abs. Really? It does have abs and power steering. Oh, nice. But no, no airbags, no traction control or anything like that. It it, I will say that it drives better now than it did when we got it.

We, we’ve done chuckle. It drove like a boat when we got it to the point where we had it at the compound and we got in, he’s like, I want you to tell me if you think it’s like a boat. And we drove down the end of the driveway and hit the brakes. I think, I think boat’s the wrong analogy. I think it was like, is it like an airplane that Yeah, that’s, that’s because, because when you got on boost, like the front nose would just lift up because the front shots were completely blown.

And it would just like lift the car up by almost a foot. Yeah. Because of how, how bad the shocks were. So we, we ended up replacing the shocks. We ended up putting new springs on it. We found which, which, which, which was a huge surprise because when I [00:51:00] went to take the shocks off one, I found out how blown they are.

Cause I could just extend and collapse them by hand. Um, as if I was using like a slinky, it was like a slinky, that’s how bad they were. What was worse was on the driver’s side, the spring was like two coils longer than on the passenger side. So somebody had gone in there at some point, and it also had a aftermarket shock in it.

And replaced the shock and spring on the left side. So what we think happened is that at some point in its history that it must have been in a front end collision because the bumper doesn’t quite align correctly and there’s been modifications to where the bumper and the nose cone mounts to the vehicle and you can see some slight blending in the paint on the center.

Yeah, the, the paint is blended. Um, the, the mounting points for the bumper, one of them is almost two inches higher than the other. No. That, maybe not two inches. It’s more like an inch. It’s definitely not right. And we’ve, it looks like somebody has been in there already, but for the driver’s side, when we were doing all [00:52:00] that work, we found what the axle was in seated correctly.

So to take the front suspension off, you kind of have to pull the half shaft out of the transmission to be able to get it off room to like free the, free the suspension components and what I think happened. It was probably prior to me when somebody did these shenanigans of installing an aftermarket shock on just one side of the car and a different size spring on that one side of the car, they probably screwed with the, the inner roller bearing that’s on the inside of that half shaft that goes into the transmission.

That then is the bearing that that whole axle rides on inside the transmission and they knocked one of the cups off. So when I, when I did this, I found out that that cup was actually sitting inside and all the bearing needles were sitting inside there. Uh, but not all of them. It’s a tripod axle then the way it’s a tripod.

Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, for most of us, that’s a really common part. We [00:53:00] run down to, you know, advanced auto and go pick one up for, you know, 60 bucks and call it a day. And then that’s another challenge of owning an imported car. So where are you getting parts for the four 80? Yeah, so, um, Netherland Florida, actually.

Florida, yeah. So, um, because, uh, all those are shares a whole bunch of parts with the Reno. It’s funny you keep saying the Reno, like there’s only one in existence. So is there a particular one like the R five or the R 21? Or, or, or is it It shares a lot of parts with I think the second generation Cleo.

Okay. I could see that. And again, yeah, I had done, uh, when we first got in the car, like did it, took a test drive, found the horrible suspension liftoff problem, I did a survey of all the stuff that I wanted to, to do maintenance on and, and replace and made a big parts order from two or three different places in Europe.

Kix is a, uh, a parts [00:54:00] company in Germany that makes and remanufacture a whole bunch of, uh, Volvo and SOB car parts. So I got some stuff from them. And then, um, there’s, there’s a handful of just big superstore car parts, places in the, in the, uh, Europe. Uh, so like auto, auto dock. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them.

Uh, I think I made a big parts order with them and then found the, the suspension bits that I needed, like the, the strut bearing on the top for the front STRs, the, the bill sign, struts and lowering springs all in, um, either the UK or Netherlands. I, I placed a bunch of orders from, from Europe. They arrived from three or four different places.

I did all that work in preparation of going to rad Wood. In, in New Jersey in 2019. So the story of me replacing the front suspension, finding all these weird suspension problems that were there, finding this inner inner roller bearing, uh, [00:55:00] tripod bearing, uh, on the axle was six days before I was supposed to go to Rawood.

So I’m like, oh shit, I’m not gonna be able to take the four 80 to Rawood. I’ve already emailed them and said, Hey, I’ve got this Volvo four 80 that I wanna bring to Rawood. Can I get into the royalty? Was it royalty? I I, there’s some like higher tier of Rawood where you can bring in special cars and pay more money to bring in special cars.

Yes. They were all excited for me to bring the four 80 to them, and then 6 84 Rawood. I found this problem. I’m like, oh crap, I’m not gonna be able to bring it cuz I’m not gonna be able to get it on the road cuz I’m not gonna be able to find the part. So I spent like a day. Doing parts interchange and cross reference search and found that somebody on eBay in Florida was like the North American and South American distributor and reseller, reseller for Reno parts in kind of this region.

And he just happened to have one that like crossmatched to, to the Volvo four 80. So I ordered that and thankfully was able to get the [00:56:00] car back together and, uh, make it to Rawood. It, it was an interesting experience putting that back together. We, we still have part of it. It’s actually on the key ring, isn’t it?

Yes. I, I use one of the, the outer bearing races from that tripod bearing as a key ring for the Volvo 40. Very cool. So other than car shows and whatnot, what have you guys done with the four 80? Have you done any sorts of, you know, let’s say motorsports events with it? Have you done an otros, maybe a de I mean, outside of, you know, the standard cars and coffee, maybe some touring as you guys mentioned.

Have you done anything that’s, that’s about it. I think he’s probably slightly too paranoid about his cars doing some racing stuff with them. I mean, like we, we are very much a house that there are no garage queens at all allowed. But I think he’s still a little sensitive to some of these things, especially if.

For the four 80 because it’s so hard to get parts that if something bad were to happen, we would be in a weird spot trying to get pieces for it to get it back together and get it up and running, especially when it’s just [00:57:00] fun to drive around. Like the weather here is cooler areas right now. We don’t need to have air conditioning so we can drive through the country and see all the fall leaves.

Right now we’ve got all the hills and there’s, the roads out here are just so nice and we don’t exactly have a lot of really good performance cars. I think the four 80 Turbo is, is the closest thing that we have to one that could potentially do good on a track. I, I think it’d be fun to drive somewhere where you could kind of test it out and put it, put it at its limits a bit.

I don’t know if I would do autocross. But, well, I mean, I always bring up De and, and, and Mike and Brad and I, you know, we’re coaches, so you’re never, you’re not out there alone. It’s not door to door, there’s no bumping and grinding. So it’s always a good experience. And summit point’s not very far from us.

And you know, it’s a true way to really open it up, clear out the carbon as we say, and, and what it’s made of. Right. But you know, you’re, again, you’re not alone. You have somebody parroting in your ear what to do and, and you know, it’s a no, it’s a non-contact sport. So, so, uh, something to think about and, and for, and, and in [00:58:00] terms of costs, you know, we talk about this on, on previous episodes, it’s cheap and affordable.

Right? It’s an easy way to get in. I mean, for five, six hours of track time, if you want to use all of it, it’s a couple hundred bucks, right? Why not? It’s probably the most fun you’re gonna have for that kind of money, right? And, and also like, and you don’t have to put, uh, roll cages and things. No. For those.

Now, for your E 30, you would need a rollbar. Oh. Cause it’s a convertible, convertible. Convertible. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, and you’d have to pass the broomstick test. And just as an aside, we were talking about the track stuff. There is, so Lockton another insurance company, actually one of the largest insurance companies, probably in North America.

You know, Lockton Affinity is, has a very large reach, but they also have a division called Lockton Motorsports. And they’re gonna be on a subsequent episode here, uh, in the near future. And they offer track insurance and it’s kind of a no questions asked, full value declared value policy. So if you walk up and say, based on my mods, based on this, based on rarity, that Volvo is worth 50 grand, they’ll ensure it for 50 grand.

And if something happens, they’ll cut you [00:59:00] a check. That’s pretty good. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. So it’s a x percent deductible depending on how much you pay. It’s 10% with a minimum deductible of $2,000. So we, I just went through that. It’s all fresh in my head still. Yeah. But if you guys wanna learn more about that, I mean, this is totally an aside, it’ll, it’s gonna be on a episode coming up very soon.

Did you, did you learn that because you had to go through it very quickly? Actually, actually one of our members did go through it. We wrote an article about it back in 2018, right about the time you got your, your Volvo. And he went through it with a Mustang that he hadn’t had for very long. And his significant other ended up having a, a really good off, we’ll call it that, kiss the cement barrier and, uh, crunched up the left front of the car and they, he had track insurance on it.

They took care of everything, it was no questions asked. Unlike dealing with a standard insurance company, they’re used to dealing with track incidents and track cars and things like that. And, you know, if you walked up to John’s car today, you wouldn’t know the difference. Very cool. Very cool. So my next question for you guys is, you know, outside of [01:00:00] that, what are the plans for the car?

Because you know, as we all have these special cars in our garages, there’s like calibers of, of done. Like is it done, is it done, done? Or is there just something more on the list to check off? What’s the future of there’s, there’s always more so like, So we, the Volvo Parade came with two interiors, came with a leather interior, and then it came with that lovely 1980s pristine, uh, bus fabric interior, which, which is what we have in it.

And you, you just can’t beat that feeling with it. But the door cards don’t laugh that loudly. This is a painful experience for us. Both the door cards, the original vinyl that covers them is, um, vacuum formed onto it, which they’re very, um, modern cards are plastic door cards. Even in BMWs, the door cards don’t have as significant of a profile as the four 80 does.

It’s got some deep pockets in there, so when they vacuum formed it, the glue overtime naturally breaks down. So you get these bubbles [01:01:00] of air and you ruin the form in the shape of the door card because you’ve got that pocket underneath it. Well, on the driver’s side, the door was. Really bad to the point of you couldn’t use part of where the door handle was.

Like you’d go to grab the door handle and like, there should be a gap there for your hand to wrap around the handle. But the vinyl had come up and you would just hit this bubble of vinyl every time you tried to. So we had made the decision that we did a lot of research. We watched a bunch of videos, um, that we were gonna pull the vinyl off and put a new vinyl leather look covering on top of it.

So I am a, uh, I do a lot of sewing, I do a lot of craft work, I do a lot of building stuff, and I do custom patterning. So I had created a custom pattern for the door card with nice stitching detail to piece in that, that high profile that the door had. But we did not have the expertise in laying down the glue are stretching the material [01:02:00] correctly, upholstery’s hard, especially, especially if we hard, we’ve never done it before, especially and only watched YouTube videos.

Yeah, so it was one of those, so I had, I had it mocked out and muslin and I had it fitted and it, and it laid well. It was just a matter of the vinyl that we got was a two-way stretch. Oh. It was a two-way stretch, not a four-way, so two-way stretch. Vinyl means it only moves. Side to side or up and down?

Yeah, not both. So you have to pay attention to how you’re cutting and stitching your pieces together to make sure that it stretches in the orientation that you want it to. So I spent all this time making sure that it could stretch and form to that high profile door card. And even that with the glue that we got wasn’t enough to get it to fit.

We got most of the wrinkles out, but it just, the look wasn’t quite right. It was hell of a lot better than the air bubble that was originally there. But now that we had pulled the vinyl off of one door card and we had the other one in place. By the way, this was what, two weeks before Rawood? When we Was it Rad Wood?

It was Wasn’t [01:03:00] Rawood? It was Rawood because it, yes, it was Rawood. So it was like two weeks before Rawood where we had found out that none of this was going to work. So we ended up pulling the vinyl off of both of the door cards, including the one that I had made, scrubbing as much of the glue off as we can and experimenting with different paint and texture compounds.

So the Volvo does not have vinyl door cards on it. It looks like it does until you touch it. And it’s because this guy with the paint master skills of spray paint and texturizer, it looks like vinyl. It’s got the texture of vinyl. As long as you don’t touch it, that’s the only thing that that would let you know that it’s not it.

So from about a foot away, the door cards look pretty original. Yeah. Uh, but if you touch them, you’ll, you’ll know that they’re not original. Uh, essentially I use like two different tr types of truck bed liner and then color match the spray spray paint to get the right color to try to match it to the interior.

It’s really, really close, but it’s not final. So like [01:04:00] that’s one of the things I’d like to get fixed. I think the only real way to get it fixed is to actually get. Somebody in the Netherlands who has spare door cards to mail me some and I’ve, I’ve found some people who, who have some. We also had it priced out how to do the vacuum form on the door cards, and it was astronomical because it was, it would’ve been custom for it.

We also looked at pricing up custom up poultry for the door cards and that was like way, way, way too much. Fixing the door cards on the interior is one of the things that we definitely wanna do with the up upgraded ECU that I got that updates the fuel map and ups, the boost of working dsi have certainly noticed that the clutch lips when it’s really on high boost.

So, uh, unfortunately Volvo, this is actually, uh, on top of parts being really hard to find for the four 80 cuz they’re never sold here. A lot of the parts aren’t even made anymore cuz they were never really all that popular cars. The parts are even hard to find for folks in Europe who have them, of which the turbo was [01:05:00] produced in much fewer numbers than some of the other models.

Of the four 80, uh, they had a naturally aspirated 1.7 liter and they also had a 2.0 liter, uh, also naturally aspirated. But, uh, so the turbo was producing fewer numbers, so there’s fewer parts for them and it uses a different size flywheel and clutch this, uh, than the other ones. And they don’t make it anymore.

And none of the aftermarket parts flyers make it. So I spent a good part of my quarantine time during, uh, during C O V I D cross-referencing and researching sac and sax parts and reno parts, and finally finding a part number that I think is gonna work as a replacement upgraded clutch that won’t, that hopefully won’t slip, but I have no idea if it’s gonna fit.

So it sounds to me like in this case, You’re, and, and don’t take this the wrong way, it sounds like you’re a bit of a purist, right? Because we come at it from the motor sports world and getting a custom clutch made is not really a big deal. You take your stock clutch, you send it [01:06:00] out, and somebody makes you one.

Like there’s companies like Center Force and Kennedy and a lot of others that’ll do that. So it, I guess it depends on your level, but I, I respect it, right? Because I look at it from the perspective of, you know, this is a really interesting like concourse car where you wanna keep it period appropriate.

You want to keep it as original as possible. You wanna do all these kinds of things that somebody doesn’t come back and say, wow, you have this other thing in there, but. For those of us on the other side of the fence, we’re like, blow up a clutch, whatever, we’ll get another one. We’ll get one made. You know, that kind of, it’s not a big deal.

It’s kind of the same with the axles too. It’s like, well those inner bearings probably the same as a Volkswagen. It’s like, just go swap ’em from something else. But you know, I understand it’s part of that, I don’t wanna call it the obsession, but it’s part of the passion around this car. And I really, I really appreciate that and I really sympathize with it because I’ve, I’ve been through it with some other cars myself.

I mean, I had an original Audi Quattro and I nerded out on that thing forever. And I had a coop Quatro, not a F, not a 4,000. Right? So those cars extremely rare. Only 627 of ’em [01:07:00] brought to North America, not just the US but North America. So, fi talk about finding rare parts and stuff like that. But, you know, we’ve talked about this on other episodes.

We have members in G T M with, we have a Reno R five Turbo two, we’ve got some Packards, we’ve got all these other cars. And it’s like, you know, we talk about scarcity and rarity of parts and, and a lot of people have come to the conclusion that, no, you’re not gonna find a part for 1927, you know, super eight, you’re gonna have to have somebody make it for you.

It’s just, it’s gotten to that point. Right. But, but there’s some allowances there. Right. And if you are a hardcore concourse person, they, they’re allowing that nowadays. And, and it’s stuff that you can’t visually see, but it helps the operation of the vehicle. Right. So, but I get it, it’s a struggle overall.

It’s super interesting. It’s so unique. I mean, so by your research, are there any other four 80 s in the United States, or are you kind of in a, in a group by yourself? One, I, I know of at least one. Maybe two. I think in early days of bring a [01:08:00] trailer, there was a white one listed before they started the auction site on Bring a trailer a while back.

That was somewhere down in Florida, but that’s all I’ve ever seen of that one. And then I did, I did come across somebody on one of the European Volvo four 80 forums who I think is involved with like the Volvo Club of America, who’s out in California, who actually has one. Interesting. He has a earlier, I think it’s an 88 naturally aspirated, and I think he was in one of the Volvo Club magazines with his P 1800 ES hatchback from the seventies next to the four 80 Turbo Hatchback.

And so there’s some silent cues there shared between the P 1800, uh Es. And the, the four 80 as kind of the, the follow on to that. And then the C 30 is kind of a follow on to the four 80. Absolutely. I could definitely see that. So I wanna ask, and C 30 always looked fun except for that. Except for that big window.

[01:09:00] Yeah, well that back, that back glass they borrowed from launch, but you know, we won’t, we’ll leave that alone. But any rate, because the, the Y 10 or the ipson d e as they called it in Italian, they, uh, they had that same rear trunk and obviously those rear lights are from the suv. I mean, that’s kind of, it had a weird backend to it.

It’s very strange. But I wanted to ask, you know, because this is still kind of fresh for you guys. I mean, we’re talking 2018 timeframe, only two years, let’s call it three. As we, as we move into 21, would you go back and do it all over again? Or would you slap yourself silly if you had a time machine? I would go back and do it all over again in a heartbeat and maybe buy two.

Two more of them. I was gonna say for the four 80, yes, we would do it all over again. Probably. Definitely get a second one if we could. At maybe three, depending, like we were in a weird situation where we had like one extra parking space at the compound, so we could have had the extra car. If we were in a better situation, we would’ve had more spots.

Probably could have bought over more [01:10:00] cars. We looked at other cars. We talked about buying more than just the four 80, but that was the one that we brought back. At one point you even asked me if I had anything I wanted to add to your trailer or had your shipment. We did, yeah. Wow. So I think we covered a lot of interesting stuff here.

This is a very unique car. I think you guys are in a really unique position, but it’s also interesting to hear all these things, and as I said, kind of in the pre-show, there’s so many different types of car enthusiasts out there, and there’s so many different stories that just aren’t shared. And when you walk by a car like yours at a car show, you look at it and you go, huh?

What’s that? But you ne you gotta take that extra step to get the story out. So I thank you guys so much. I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show and sharing this with everybody and getting us to know a little bit more about something as unique as the Volvo four 80. And for all of our listeners out there, we’re gonna post some pictures and extra information about the car, specifically Nate’s car on our website, so gt motorsports.org, and we’ll [01:11:00] probably repost that on Garage Riot and that way you guys can go see the visuals as you’re going through this particular episode.

So again, Nate and Emily, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for letting me talk about the four 80. Um, it’s really fun, uh, taking it out and letting people, uh, see it as, as we’ve talked about, it’s a bit quirky and most people just kind of pass it by. But for that one person who’s like a weird Volvo head, That sees it and is able to see it in the us it like, it makes me so happy when we, so I’m gonna, I’m gonna put this out there and I know it’s gonna make Emily mad, but I gotta get a chance to drive it that way I can write a test drive article on it.

What do you think? I, I, I, that would be fine. I will eventually get to drive it. Let’s be clear. One way or another it’s gonna happen. It’s gonna have to move across the parking lot or move across something and he’s gonna be in a boot or unable to do it. He’ll spike his dream myself working on the Mercedes again.

That’s right. Well, on that note, thank you again. [01:12:00] Yeah. Thanks. Thanks.

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