Why car enthusiasts are suddenly lusting after once-ridiculed old Volvos
A sighting of a 1980s Volvo induces a bout of wistfulness for Porter
The camera roll in my phone used to be dominated by pictures of my wife and my friends. Then I got a dog. Sadly for her, a couple of years later our first child was born, and from that point on it’s been the kids that dominate the ‘recents’ album in my cloud. The only other things to get a look in are meter readings, labels of pasta sauce spotted in foreign supermarkets that appear to say TURD, and, of course, cars. Quite a lot of cars.
The other day, at an event, someone asked to see a photo of a car I own and, naively, I used the search feature that lives within the iPhone photo app. Which was stupid, because searching ‘cars’ returned thousands of results, mostly of cars I do not and never have owned. There they were, every tidy 635i, rotting SEAT Marbella and shiny Toyota Century I’ve ever seen in the wild. Rather than finding a photo of my actual car, it would have been quicker to get a cab 100 miles back to my house and show it to the interested person in real life.
So when I tell you that last week I took a picture of a car, this isn’t an earth-shattering revelation. What made this photo notable was that, firstly, it involved a small diversion. I was driving through Gloucestershire, minding my own, when I spotted this car parked outside a garden centre. To get a picture of it involved half a lap of the next roundabout and then a detour into a car park. So there was a tiny amount of extra effort involved. Which is odd, because I did all of this to take a photo – well, alright, two photos – of a 1989 Volvo 760 saloon.
Not just any 1989 Volvo 760 saloon, mind you. No sir, this was a 1989 Volvo 760 Turbo saloon. With, as the second line of bootlid badging told me, an intercooler. Yet I wouldn’t have taken a picture of a 760 when it was current, and not just because I didn’t carry a glass rectangle in my pocket with a surprisingly high-quality camera on its back in those days. I wouldn’t have taken a picture because I thought the Volvo 760, Turbo or not, was crap.
And I wasn’t alone in this view, because when the 760 came out Gordon Murray was quoted in Autocar as calling it ‘obscene’. He was back for more in 1990, telling Motor Sport it was part of ‘an awful trend’ and that ‘if everyone drove around in Volvo 760s there’d be no room on the road for you and me!’ In its day, however, the size and weight of the 760 weren’t what I disliked about the car; it was what it stood for. Those Volvos seemed so fussy and old-fashioned and uncool. They were, literally and philosophically, square.
It’s funny what happens when you don’t see certain cars every day, or even every month. They take on a totally different dimension. Once upon a time you wouldn’t have given a Metro a second glance because they were everywhere. Now, if you’ve a hint of refined oil in your arteries, you’ll do a double take. Especially if it’s an early one in Snapdragon Yellow. The same is true here. Once a Volvo 760 was a dull, fusty block driven by a smug retiree in financially comfortable trousers. But when you don’t see particular cars around, and when they’re not current, they take on interesting new qualities.
For one thing, and with apologies to Gordon Murray, the 760 doesn’t look particularly big these days (according to a contemporary brochure it weighs 1435kg so it’s not especially heavy by modern standards either). More than that, the styling is quite appealing in a straight-cut and upright sort of way. There’s something tasteful about how flat and plain the panels are.
And where once the 760 would have symbolised smug suburbanism, in 2025 it’s apparently seen as quite cool by people who weren’t alive in the late ’80s. Whereas I was, and for this reason the 760 comes wrapped in a duvet of nostalgia, not for the 760 itself, but for the era it symbolises. It’s worth a quick loop around a roundabout on a damp afternoon in Gloucestershire to have a quick hit of a profoundly powerful Proustian rush. But, wistfulness aside, it’s probably a sign of middle age that I can now appreciate a little of what people saw in those cars at the time.
There’s something stout about them that, as my beard grows grey and my knees become weak, I can really start to enjoy. I know they’re slow and they don’t handle especially well but, dammit, I bet the door shuts sound absolutely gorgeous. And that’s another reason why I paused on a journey to take pictures of a Volvo 760. Plus, I needed something to go alongside those shots of my kids and my dog and all those other cars I don’t own.
This story was first featured in evo issue 310.
