My 2001 Volvo V70 T5: Investing in Durable Goods (Part 1)

Station wagons have always appealed to me for their versatility. Quite frankly, I’m not dead-set against a CUV either, as they’re just tall wagons. My biggest gripe against CUV’s is the lack of manual transmissions. As long as it’s a long roof with a clutch pedal, I’m happy. Combine that with my penchant for Volvo wagons, and one random spring day in 2017 I stumbled across my next COAL: another Volvo wagon.

The CL ad said very little, other than it was a 2001 V70 with a five-speed manual transmission. The silver paint did a good job of hiding all the small imperfections that a +200k mile car would have. I took the short trip over to Storrs, CT to look at the car. It was owned by a visiting professor at UConn (who happened to be from Belgium). The family said the car was just too small for their family of five (two parents and three rapidly growing boys). They had owned the car for only a few years, adding minimal mileage to the 217,000 on the clock. The wife mentioned “it didn’t like to accelerate”, but a quick trip around the country roads of CT indicated a solid car. Of course I didn’t have the foggiest idea of what things could be wrong with it, but it drove straight, started and stopped, had five forward gears and a long-roof. I was sold!

Fast forward to the next weekend, and I appear with $700 cash. The family is putting the finishing touches on detailing the car for me, which I find oddly endearing. I head back to my apartment in RI and get on the internet to do some more research into what I had just bought. My Volvo was a ’01, the first year of the P2 platform wagon (the P2 S80 and debuted the year before). For the intro year you could have had a straight-five in several guises: a 2.5L naturally aspirated, a 2.4L light pressure turbo, and the 2.3L high-pressure turbo T5. I knew my car was relatively rare with the manual transmission, but could I possibly have a T5? I ran back out to the car, and sure enough the reflective silver T5 adorned the hatch lid. Talk about lucky.

I relegated my Focus to stand-by status while I relished the joy of driving a new car. The AC didn’t work, nor did the headlights (they were in permanent DRL mode), and there were a few other little things (the “roof-window” as the Belgians called it, also didn’t work properly). But surprisingly for a car of this age and mileage, almost all of the fancy electronic bits worked. The auto-dimming rearview mirror, power windows and locks and even the memory power seats worked as they should. The P2 platform has a relatively large following and robust internet help was only a few clicks away. Since the V70 shares 85% of its bones with the XC70 there is also a huge aftermarket for repair parts and upgrades. Trips to the local pick-n-pulls always reveal at least three P2 platform cars awaiting the crusher.

I managed to figure out a few repairs myself right away. The headlight switch unit is notoriously dodgy in the P2’s, so I grabbed one of them, along with a much nicer grill, from an S80. As it turns out, the S80, while looking alike and sharing many parts, are not exactly the same. The mounting clips for the light switch were different, and the grille I had nabbed was a few mm different in length and width. I still cannot fathom why Volvo would go to the expense of developing two grilles that look almost identical, but not quite. While the grille went unused, the light switch solved the issues with the headlights. I had also found the correct Mass Airflow Sensor on the S80 which handily resolved the acceleration issues the car was suffering from. This V70 would be my first turbo car, and running up through the gears with a properly functioning intake system was intoxicating – I was hooked.

While driving to my internship a few days later I was accelerating on the highway when I heard a sudden “whoomph”. The car was instantly down on power and I edged my way over to an off-ramp. I parked it in a run-down industrial part of town, got a ride and tried to figure out what was going on. Email and text based sleuthing with my friends offered me many different options, but without being hands on with the car, it would be impossible to tell until later. I was filled with dread; had I spent money on a car that needed significant work right away? AAA came to the rescue and towed the car to a friend’s house that evening. Upon inspection the only problem was the intake pipe for the turbo had never been properly reattached after some previous work. Quick work with a screwdriver secured the pipe and I was back in business, turbo style.

Over the course of that summer, my friends and I had many beers and I slowly fixed various things that needed attention. The sunroof (roof-window) was repaired with some AAA batteries that were soldered together for the car alarm siren (don’t ask why the sunroof circuit is wired through the car-alarm siren). The latch for the fold-down rear seat was also on the fix-it list. Luckily for me local junkyards were filled with P2 era cars, mostly XC70’s, S60’s and a few V70’s. I’d learn over the years what to look for in the P2 chassis cars, and would amass a stash of parts, including complete doors and whatnot.

My first road trip with the V70 came up that summer. M and I were going down to Delmarva to camp, eat shellfish and enjoy the beaches.

All went according to plan until about halfway through the trip. We had just left a national historic site and I noticed some of the electrics were being wonky. With hindsight, I know this meant a dying alternator, but I was relatively new to self-diagnosis at the time, so wasn’t sure what was going on. I eventually limped the car into a chain (Mavis Tire, I believe). Given that this was a Sunday evening right before a Monday holiday, I begged them to help us out. They gave me a quote of up to $800 (in 2017 money), and in the moment I had no choice. I offered to help, and many hours later we all managed to wrestle the alternator out of its hidden spot. Since I had pitched in with my own labor, and was prepared to tip, I was a bit shocked when they hit me with the full $800 tab. What can you do when you’re stuck like that though? M wasn’t all that pleased having to sit in a waiting room of a shop, especially since (I found out later) her grandmother was just admitted to the hospital. Fortunately, the rest of the trip came off without a hitch. A few years later I’d have to replace the alternator again, and while it was another pain in the you-know-what, I was able to do the job with a bit more ease.

When it came time to name the V70, I decided to take a page from a friend who called it speedy. The V70 was henceforth known as Speedy Pete, or Pete for short. And talk about speed…I had never owned a turbo car before, and I was hooked. In the V70 lineup, the T5 is the middle child of the turbos. As originally launched, the V70 came with a 2.4 naturally aspirated straight 5, a light-turbo’d 2.4, the high-pressure 2.3 turbo, and the big boy, the 300-horse turbo R. There were a few people in my car group who were also enamored with the V70, and one had an R that he manual swapped. Another was desperate to find a Flash Green with the Alacantra seats…to the annoyance of everyone else in the group. I had also witnessed the bills that were associated with the fancy suspension and other bits. For my money, a T5 with a five-speed (a mere 268 horses) with a “normal” suspension is the way to go. There is a robust aftermarket for the P2 cars that can easily help you build a T5 into a monster, big or small, without all the extra headaches of the R. Anyone I see a P2 V70 pop up on a list of “sleepers”, it’s always the R and I comment with my refrain that a T5 is cheaper and better…but no one listens.

Speaking of expensive work on P2’s, later that summer, I gathered my willing friends and did the timing belt change. Another first for me, this is quite a project. The straight-five may have been a marvel of packaging, but when you wedge a long engine between suspension bits (also contributing to one of the biggest complaints of P2’s – terrible turning radius), you don’t have a lot of room to work. Many hours and many beers later, the job was done. I was happy to put the time and money into Pete, because he was eminently useful, comfortable and a joy to drive.

Later that summer my friends and I all took a trip up to visit one of our number who had decamped for a job in Maine. It was a lovely weekend (one of the high-points of my friendship with that group of people, to be certain). Photos of that party include shots of the driveway – six long-roofs (and one long-roof crossover) – made me very happy indeed.

After driving with mismatched plastic hubcaps for quite some time, I finally took them off and drove with bare steelies for a while. I spotted another P2 V70 in a parking lot with XC wheels and really liked how they looked on the non-lifted car. A weird quirk of the two Pick and Pulls in Rhode Island (at the time) was the policy that they yanked the wheels off of all the cars in the yard before putting them out, so I had to look further afield for XC wheels. I located in a nearby yard (the recently gone G.A.W. yard, thanks COVID).

There was also a V70R that was being stripped of parts, and I pulled an instrument cluster (with the brushed trim rings). I started off at BJ’s for some new tires, and ran into a bit of a problem – they wouldn’t sell me anything but what the T5 originally called for, and nothing that would go on the XC wheels. I finally found a local place that would sell me decent tires (I was never going to need H-rated tires because I was never going to drive over 110 miles an hour, but I knew they were bound by legal liabilities). A few months later, I would decide to swap out the cluster for the R…and found out that the P2 chassis did not like to play nice with parts from a different year car. I averted a disaster and put my original cluster back in, but not before trying to swap just the gauge faces. To this day, the temperature gauge is the only one with a metal trim ring.

I would find out just how useful Pete was in the Spring of 2018. The foreign friend that I had made at Carlisle in 2017 was importing a Fiat Tempra into the US, and I agreed to go down to New Jersey to the docks to pick it up. Clearly confident in the abilities of the V70 and the junkyard tow-bar I had sourced a few months earlier, I rented a U-Haul dolly and headed down to the Garden State to yank my newest (temporary) car home. Pete handled it with the greatest of ease, almost as if the Fiat wasn’t behind me. It was the first time I would tow with Pete, but definitely not the last. Over the years I would haul multiple U-Haul box trailers of varying sizes, small sail-boats, a double axle U-Haul utility trailer (how else are you going to move a cheap two-post lift) and eventually another COAL, a Sterling 825. As they say, though, that’s a story for another time.

In my personal life, I was settling into fatherhood as best I could, splitting time between Rhode Island and where my son lived in New Haven, CT. I had started a new relationship with M as well, who also lived in New Haven. Pete made an excellent road trip companion for those long drives. I had graduated with my Master’s in Social Work and got my first license to practice, along with a new job working in a refugee resettlement agency. It was enjoyable work, and I finally felt somewhat settled. This was in mid-2019 and for anyone reading this in 2026, we’re all aware what was looming on the horizon. In my last entry, I mentioned that I was forced to move from the second floor of my apartment to the first floor, and neither my landlords nor I were happy with our arrangement. With a new career and a decent income I decided to take a plunge and try to buy a house. My parents agreed to help, and I actually got as far as putting an offer in on a house. I declined to sign a new lease on my apartment, and was prepared to move forward.

In quick succession, it all fell apart. The house inspection revealed that it needed far too much work, strike one. Budgetary constraints (always an issue with non-profits) meant my job was cut, and I was unemployed. Strike 2. I was technically going to be homeless in September of 2019, strike 3. A former co-worker had a room to rent, so I was able to secure a place to put my head. The rest of my considerable things would all have to go into storage, hence the multiple U-Haul trailers behind Pete. As the Fall of 2019 rolled around, I was able to quickly find another job. This was a marked difference from my last career in the museum world to my relief. I stayed in that rented room for a while before eventually (temporarily) moving down to New Haven CT with M for a short stint. While there was no clear plan, it was better than sleeping in a rented room. I was driving 1 hour 15 minutes daily from New Haven to southern Rhode Island for my job, which was unsustainable. As 2019 wound down, I had hopes that 2020 would begin with better prospects.

 

Note: opening photo, the V70 on pickup day.

Related CC reading:

Classic CARmentary: 2001 Volvo V70 T5