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

[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.

If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about gtm, be sure to check us out on www.gt motorsports.org. You can also find us on Instagram at Grand Tour Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, you can call or text us at (202) 630-1770 or send us an email at crew chief gt motorsports.org.

We’d love to hear from you. Hey, listeners, crew Chief Erik here. Do you like what you’ve seen, heard, and read from gtm? Great. So do we, and we have a lot of fun doing it, but please remember, we’re fueled by volunteers and remain a no annual fee organization, but we still need help to keep the momentum going so that we can continue to record, write, edit, and broadcast all of your favorite content.

So be sure to visit www.patreon.com/gt motorsports or visit our website and click in the top right corner on the [01:13:00] support and donate to learn how you can help.

Some stories are just too good for the main episode… Check out this Behind the Scenes Pit Stop Minisode! Available exclusively on our Patreon.

[00:00:00] We always have a blast chatting with our guests about all sorts of different topics, but sometimes we go off the rails and dig deeper into their automotive and motorsports pasts. As a bonus, let’s go behind the scenes with this pit stop mini sode for some extra content that didn’t quite fit in the main episode.

Sit back and enjoy. Enjoy, and remember to like, subscribe, and support Brake Fix on Patreon.

So I heard y’all had a great time without me talking about imported cars and whatnot, but I want to know a little more about your car history and something Crutch called The Compound, which actually sounds very similar to The Mountain. Uh, do you want me to go first or Emily? Whichever one! Why don’t you go first?

We could get out a 20 sided die if you like and do it. Yeah, uh, yeah, I can go. Um Do you want me to, like, recount, like, how I got into cars? Yeah, that would be fun. Or the cars I started with? Sure! Like, what, which, uh, so I want to segue real quick. Because, [00:01:00] when I say this, everyone, you know, you’ll understand what I’m saying, but no one else will.

Let’s talk about the compound. Oh. Oh. We’re out of the compound, officially. I know, I know, you’re out of the We’re out of the cars! Oh, you got all the cars out! All the cars are out! It, it was, it was touch and go there for a bit. All the cars are officially out of the compound. So I think part of my becoming a gearhead story involves the fact that I had an enabler.

I read how many Ford Falcons does he own? Sorry, galaxies, galaxies, he’s got a shit ton of. So he probably has a handful of Falcons. We used to live so Nate rented a property. from somebody that he used to work with who loved cars and loved collecting cars and all matter of decay because that’s what most of them were at the time.

These were mostly non running cars. I said decay, didn’t I? [00:02:00] Highly valued replacement parts. Wait, so did you, did you Did you live in a junkyard? Basically, yes. From Google Satellite View, it definitely kind of looks like that. Well, if you could see all the cars in Google Satellite View, then yes. But most of them were under makeshift cover or had metal on top of them to protect, you know, the convertible components of them because the fabric had rotted away and had been sitting for so long.

He didn’t want the patina to change. Oh, that’s true. The patina on some of the cars is gorgeous, but still. So there’s, so the compound is a loving place where, uh, most American cars, specifically Cadillacs. Ford, Ford and Lincoln. Ford and Lincoln, sorry. Ford and Lincolns go to rest to be parted out. Some Mercurys.

And some Mercurys go to be parted out and they go there and they stay. More cars come in than leave. And we lived there for a while. For a long while. Nate lives there a lot longer and it was a, it [00:03:00] was a nice experience to like, make sure that you were up on your tetanus whenever you walked around the property.

Been there. We certainly had access to lots of equipment to work on cars, which was nice if we could get to the equipment cause there were often cars in the way. Yeah. The problem, the problem was he, well, he had like this giant, Compound shop that had like a seven bay car garage and a paint booth and a paint booth and all this stuff.

And a, uh, transmission tunnel ramp. Mostly all that stuff was covered with shit boxes that were rusting apart and boxes of parts for those cars. But so at one point, I think we had, how many cars? 10. We owned 10 cars at one point. We, yes, we had 10 at one point. We had 10 cars while we were living at the compound.

And we’ve, we’ve slowly gotten rid of a lot of them. Um, well a lot of them meaning we got rid of the one that was, like, I don’t even know why you really bought it. [00:04:00] The parts car? The parts car. The one that Crutch actually helped, helped me get to my house. Towed it from Delaware to Central Maryland. Yeah.

It had to be loaded on my trailer with a forklift. Yeah. So that was, that was an E34 that I got for 300 bucks. For the engine. So that I could take the engine out of it because it’s the M30B35. But we kept the whole car rather than just pulling the engine because you know we can make money off of the parts, uh huh.

And it sat. And we never made money off of the parts. This is starting to sound, this is starting to sound a lot like the mountain. This is what the mountain aspires to be. No, no. What is, what is the mountain? We have, we have another member. Mountain Man Dan. Mountain Man Dan. He has, uh, over under 150 Jeddas on his property, it seems.

And Volkswagen Golfs. Holy cow! [00:05:00] I’m exaggerating, obviously. But. He, uh, he has There’s 10, 20 square body trucks. There’s definitely north of 30 cars on the property. Yeah, there’s one Volkswagen. No, no, there’s the domestic section. There’s the import section. There are two and I like, I have to, I have to specify there is a Mercury Sable wagon and a Taurus wagon.

Do not confuse the two because if you talk about them, he gets upset. Also, if you call them donor cars, he gets upset. He gets really upset when you show up and take parts from his cars when he’s not there. That’s very true. That’s very true. Brad and I didn’t do that once overnight. Now, not at all. No, not at all.

So yeah. So it, the ratio right now is like one car per acre. So, you know, Hey, whatever, but you know, we’re getting there. So, yeah, the compound, uh, uh, my, my landlord’s hoarding habits, uh, [00:06:00] rubbed off on me a bit. And I started with my, uh, Saab 9 5 and then I got the Volvo Amazon. And then when I found out that the Volvo Amazon that I bought was so rusty and the rear axle needed to be replaced and all that.

I ended up finding another Volvo Amazon out in Tucson, Arizona. That was rust free that I got shipped across country using Uship. And then, uh, it showed up with, uh, with no, uh, with no, no running gear. So just, just the body, no front or rear suspension, but thankfully my landlord on the compound has a forklift.

And of course this car was on a, what is that? Like one of those big. Uh, mobile parking garage trailers. The one with all the weird angles that can tilt and double decker, double decker car trailer thing. We had a forklift. It came off, but it was, how did they get it off? They had a forklift. [00:07:00] The car was put on a big homemade wooden pallet and then.

Forklifted onto the top of this, uh, car moving trailer thing. Then my landlord had a forklift and I used the forklift to forklift it off and then, uh, got it on the property on the compound. That one we were actually able to keep undercover for a while. So that, that one was nice and protected and remained rust free.

But the compound certainly contributed to other habits because That you had those two cars plus your other car. So you want to talk about the Mercedes? Oh, no, not yet. Oh, do you still have the Mercedes? I do. Well, technically not right now That’s it. That’s another fun one. So why don’t we just talk about the Mercedes?

Well, let me set this up first. It was a Mercedes station wagon No, no, no, we’ll come back to that. With rear facing back seats All of your dirty laundry for cars is coming out because I have to live with [00:08:00] you. So, this is about the time when we started living together. And I have two kids and he has two kids, so that’s six people.

That’s a lot of people if you want to go some place as a family together. So, this is This gentleman over here decided, well, we should get a vehicle that can seat all of us. Okay, cool. Well, I’ve been looking at this Mercedes W124 station wagon for a while and I think that’s it. And then, hey, I found one for sale on eBay.

What do you think? I don’t know why we’re buying a car right now. Well, there’s this one and it’s only like, I don’t even think we were talking about buying a car. I think I was just showing you the car. What do you think of this? That’s the way it looks. I did not at all allude to buying a car. That’s where it gets even worse.

Is he showed it to me and said, what do you think about it? And I said, it was fine. But I was not under the impression that we were buying a car. We took the kids to a park that day. And then the next words out of his mouth as we were sitting on the bench together was, oh shit. I’m like, what do you mean?

[00:09:00] Oh shit. I bought a car. What the fuck are you talking about? You bought a car. Remember that Mercedes wagon I showed you? I bought it. Can we go to New Jersey and pick it up on Thursday? So this car was listed on eBay and when I saw it, it was a fairly low price. I think it was like, I don’t know, like high, high, like 1, 800, 2, 000.

Uh, and I’m like, oh, that’s pretty cheap, so let me put a bid on it, and then, uh, not thinking that I would actually win it, like two days later, uh, I actually won it for like twenty eight hundred bucks. The moral of the story is don’t put them in on a car unless you’re actually ready to buy it. So he ended up buying it and we ended up making the trip to New Jersey and the trip up was lovely and then we got To the shop where the car was and then we learned about the car.

I think the trip overall was lovely It was lovely until you learned about the car What was it the? fuel gauge [00:10:00] didn’t work What else did we found out that the fuel gauge sender was actually missing Was there a hole in the tank because of that? The guy who sold it to me just said the fuel gauge didn’t work and then when we actually got it home and dug into it there was no fuel sender in the tank at all.

Like somebody had like, it had probably broken at some point. They had taken it out and just put the lid back on. It was gone. Uh, so the fuel, the fuel gauge didn’t work. I feel like something else that, Oh, the locks. Yeah. So we pick up the car, we buy the car, uh, we, we, uh, drive it away and go to some parking lot where we can like actually check it out after we bought it and figure out all the things.

We went to White Castle. Um, and after we checked it out, we then went to White Castle and then we were in like some shady part of New Jersey. As every White Castle is. As, as probably where every White Castle is located. And the locks didn’t. I’ve been there. We’re like car, were you way up the, were you way up the turnpike?

[00:11:00] What were you, way up the Jersey turnpike? Yeah. It was like right outside of New York City. I’ve probably been to that same White Castle. Yeah. You don’t wanna be there without locking your doors. Yeah. So we’re like, okay, we need locked car. We get outta the car and I lock the car and like the alarm starts going off.

Um, and so then I had to unlock the car and the alarm thankfully stopped going off. But, uh, the Mercedes, at least the W124 and probably some of the earlier models used a vacuum actuated locking system. So, uh, don’t buy a car with a vacuum actuated locking system, please. Are you saying they suck? No, they don’t

That’s the problem. Well, when, when mice invade a car and let, that’s an chew on the hard plastic vacuum lines, and they then they know. So let, let’s talk about the mice in the car minute. We live with a compound. We’re, we’re in a rural part of Laurel. and mice have been attacking this vehicle. And you’d think that at this point the mice have probably vacated the premises, but no, they did not.

We [00:12:00] found more mice or evidence of mice in said Mercedes and then all of a sudden we didn’t start. Seeing any more mice. We were kind of curious as to why there’s no more mice in the car because we didn’t really do much to get rid of them. Well, we were working on the Mercedes. We were, what, changing the oil.

We, it has, it has a protective cover underneath of it. So we’re both laying on the ground. We’re removing the screws to pull the protective cover off of the bottom of it. And this coil drops down. And we’re like, that’s really weird. And then the coil moves. Where did this hose come from? Where did the hose come from and why is it moving?

It was a snake. So we both, like, roll away from the car, across the asphalts, at the compound, and there’s a snake in the engine. I’m like, how the fuck do we get the snake out? So I put on gloves and long sleeves, and I ended up pulling the snake out of the engine as it tried to drive back into the chassis to get through to the cabin, which is not fun.

I got bit. [00:13:00] It’s not poisonous. But that was the first snake in the Mercedes. There was another snake, which he’s outside doing an oil change on the Mercedes. And all of a sudden he comes hauling ass into the house. And this is not the first of problems with Mercedes. This is the second. Several of them. Tom Holland asked in the house.

She’s like, Oh my God, I found a snake. What do I do? And I’m like, you gotta be kidding me. I scared the last one. The snake had decided to coil up on the oil containment. It was in an oil pan. Yeah. It was in an oil pan. So that one I ended up killing because we didn’t know what kind of snake it was and I was not willing to get bit again.

That one was a much smaller snake. It was a baby, but it was smaller. The first one was like massive four feet long. It was huge, but this is all. After we got the Mercedes back. So this genius just like, [00:14:00] no, no, no, no, all the, all the dirty laundry. So this genius, we get the Mercedes and we need to get it through the inspection.

So what does he want to do is he wants to replace the aluminum strips on the door. So, because they didn’t look quite right. This wasn’t related to the inspection. It was related to the inspection, getting it ready to go to Wolfson. We had to get it through the inspection first. So he’s out in the garage, by the way, compound, large area, multiple out buildings, he’s down at the back part of the property in another building at night after driving what eight hours to take your son to your parents and then back home.

And he’s, he’s scraping away at the aluminum. So molding with a brand new exacto knife and decides to slice open his So we made a trip to the emergency room. He has a lovely scar to show for it, but we had what one week to get the car past inspections and now he can’t work on it. So this, this was my, uh, Hey, honey, can you help me?[00:15:00]

Can you do the brakes? Can you do the rotors? Can you do the emergency brake on the Mercedes? That way it can just pass inspection. That’s how I learned how to do brakes and rotors was this guy with a bum hand. Oh, how about the transmission needed to pass inspection? The thing that I sliced my hand open on is certainly not at all related to the inspection.

Priorities that are important. I like, I like the car to look good. I seem to also remember stories of the transmission in that car too. So there, there were a lot of stories. So she, she had jumped all over the place, not keeping the timeline. So we’d go get the car in New Jersey. We, it doesn’t have a working fuel system or fuel gauge.

We get it back. Uh, we, we go to white castle. I mentioned that we go to the, Uh, we go to the, what’s the, Statue of Liberty? Yeah. We take the ferry out to the Statue of Liberty. Yeah. It was a good road trip for a random purchased car on eBay. That ended. Um, that, [00:16:00] that has, that has had a long tail of maintenance and car support tied to it.

It’s like a bad windows install. So we, we, we had to do a bunch of things to get it to pass inspection. Uh, the shocks were completely blown. It drove like, like, uh, like a, a donk just bouncing down the road. Um, yeah. Uh, so just, so we put H& R lowering springs, um, and, uh, it looks lovely. It’s, it’s, it’s quite beautiful.

Like, so we, we, we. We borrowed Crutch’s, uh, what is it? Fender flaring? Fender flaring tool. So we, we rolled the fenders so that we could put the nice, the nice new wheels on. They look lovely, especially with everything lowered. Fixed the, uh, grille on it so the grille is nice and shiny. Had to pull parts off of a couple of different ones that was nice to put together.

Thankfully Mercedes made a shit ton of the W124 [00:17:00] models. So they’re always in the junkyard when you need to go find parts. But it eventually got to the point where we, when we drove it back from New Jersey and a couple of times after that, we didn’t realize that the transmission fluid was low. No. So we did all that work to get the car ready to pass inspection.

And because we were going to take a road trip to New Hampshire to take it to Wolfscart. Uh, so Wolfskart is this, it’s actually a, a Volkswagen, uh, focused, uh, car show up in Vermont, in Burlington. Uh, it’s a fantastic car show. So we’re going to take the, so we took the, we took the Mercedes up there on our first big road trip after buying it later that same summer, um, it got up there with, with no problems really.

Um, and then the night before the show or the morning of the show, we go out to breakfast, get some breakfast burritos, come out to the car, there’s a puddle under it, there’s a puddle of [00:18:00] oil. Underneath the car. Not a drip, a puddle. You could swim in it. Puddle. Uh, so we, we drove down to the nearest like auto zone or uh, advanced auto parts, I forget what it was, to buy some oil.

I think it took like two quarts of oil. It was a lot. I mean the engine takes like seven, so it wasn’t, it wasn’t like completely down on oil. This wasn’t the trip that we had to replace the alternator, right? No, no. That was a second, separate trip. There have been lots of trips where things broke. So, uh, Added oil, bought some extra cans of it, did the rest of the, the show event in Wolfsgard fine, and then kind of drove, drove back to Maryland.

And on the drive back to Maryland, we noticed that the car squealed when we put it in, when we tried to put it in reverse. It’s a, it’s an automatic, and didn’t think to check the transmission fluid. Probably should have. Always check the transmission fluid. Uh, we, we got home and, [00:19:00] uh, Turned out the car was super low on transmission fluid, running it low on transmission fluid, caused the, uh, torque converter to heat up and then spin the bearing on the oil pump in the front of the transmission.

Um, and that’s what, that’s what caused all the problems. Along that same point in time. We also noticed that there was oil in the coolant reservoir. Not a good sign. Drain the oil, and we had like a full oil pan of like chocolate mix soup. It was really gross. Oh, it was nasty. Uh, so, uh, the car ended up having a head gasket problem.

Don’t say it. I mean, it probably had a head gasket problem when I bought it. We ended up pulling the engine and the transmission out and neither of us having done an automatic transmission rebuild decided, Hey, let’s try it on a Mercedes, not any of the other German or Swedish cars in the history that he [00:20:00] has worked on.

Certainly not that I’ve worked on. So my, my car history has been a whole lot of firsts and usually my firsts involve learning hard lessons and then watching a whole shit ton of YouTube videos. You’ve also just described most of our professions too. You gotta learn from somebody. Somebody else has gotta screw it up first so you can just screw it up less badly.

So we sent the head off to a shop to get the head resurfaced. We did a, uh, we did a redneck rebuild of the block. So, uh, rings and bearings and seals and all that. And we tried our hand at rebuilding the automatic transmission or at least disassembling of the automatic transmission to figure out. What was going on?

And that’s, that’s, that’s how I found the, the spun bearing on the, on the front oil pump, it was, it remained disassembled for a while in the house. By the way, we, we rebuilt [00:21:00] that transmission and the engine in the house during the winter, during the winter on the compounds. I cleared out space on our porch.

So we had a porch. It was a covered porch. It was an external cold area. So it didn’t have heat going to it, but we had already had car parts lined all the way around the porch for the other cars that we had. So I had to reorganize the porch. So we had a clean space to rebuild the transmission because you can’t rebuild a transmission.

If you’ve got crap everywhere, it has to be clean. Is Eric starting to realize why I said we need to have this conversation? Well, this is the entire pit stop right here. I’m just going to cut it out. So, so yeah, the nice thing about the compound is there’s plenty of room for cars. The not so nice thing about the compound is that none of that is indoor heated space.

Uh, so, so we pulled the we had to lift the engine into the house. And [00:22:00] do the rebuild inside the porch area. And then carry the engine back out of the house. Same thing with the transmission. So we, we ended up rebuilding the transmission. We found first gear because we didn’t have first gear before then.

But then we lost a gear when we did the rebuild. So, Well, let’s see. It’s, it’s, it’s a, I remember, I remember all these with reverse going into the transmission rebuild, reverse didn’t work coming out of the transmission rebuild, reverse worked. But fourth gear didn’t. And we, we were, we drove it like that for a while and then decided we should probably just pay somebody to do a proper rebuild on the transmission.

So we ended up, so we had put the engine and the transmission back in the Mercedes and then we ended up dropping the, our personal rebuild of the transmission out. I still remember Being under the Mercedes when it was jacked up and you’re like, are you sure you want me to take this out? [00:23:00] I’m like, yeah, I got this.

Just drop it. And I’ll shimmy it out from underneath. And he couldn’t believe that I lift the transmission out from underneath of the car like that. And that’s how we got the new one back in was the same way, because you know, we didn’t have a lift. We, we, we had to build these, uh, these cribbing blocks out of two by fours, uh, to, to jack the car.

Like, Very two and a half feet up in the air, but they’re, they’re super sturdy and they’re super easy to build just a bunch of kind of two by fours, kind of like Lincoln logs. Um, so, so that when we got all that fixed, we thought the Mercedes problems were going to stop. And then you found a hole in the muffler recently.

That’s the reason why there are other Mercedes problems. There were, but we’re, we ended up replacing the alternator on a hill in a parking lot of an auto zone. On a road trip. On the way to the vintage. Without any tools to do it. If you’ve seen the alternator on a Mercedes W124. It’s a pain in the [00:24:00] ass to get out.

And it is a pain in the ass to put back in. So if you have. If you are an individual. That is interested in working on cars. Make sure you have a friend. With narrow fingers. Good finger strength and happens to have crocheted hooks and knitting needles nearby because those things come in handy when you’re trying to get stuff out or put stuff in.

And that’s what we ended up doing when we drafted it. We had to jack up the car but it was on a hill and we had to, you know, It was just, it was so hard to do. We were there for a few hours. I think, I think, I think that was before, that might’ve been before we lowered the Mercedes. Oh yeah. And so it was actually possible to like get the alternator out without jacking it up.

Yeah. Um, but hole in the muffler. And rather than decide to fix the exhaust on the Mercedes and sell, you said something that made me think, uh, if you like working on cars, buy a Mercedes, because you’ll be able to work on them all the time. So, the [00:25:00] 1 time that he decided to not work on the Mercedes and take it to a shop, we’ve.

We’ve moved to the country. We are in north northwestern Maryland. We have a garage now. We have a garage. It’s a wonderful three bay garage. Two stories. Not tall enough to put a four post lift in. But you know, we’re, we’re talking about plans that we can, I I’m just, I’m basically around the corner from you, Eric.

Yeah. . So, you know the country and you know, the kind of trucks that drive around the country with the exhaust. And so, by the way. By the way, I’m the idiot with the European spec golf wagon running around. Oh, nice. Yeah, and I know the guy with the, with the bright orange VR6 right hand. Oh, the right hand drive one?

Yeah, he used to work, he used to work at the Starbucks. He also has a cabrio with the VR6 swap in it. Oh, nice. So, yeah. I probably should have asked you for an exhaust, uh, an exhaust shop that’s decent before I did what I did. Or I just call Mountain Man Dan down from the mountain and he’ll do it. I [00:26:00] usually do all my own work.

And in a, well, he welds. So it’s, it’s a beautiful, well, I have a welder. I know how to weld too. I went to, I took a class at Anne Arundel Community College years ago to figure out how to weld. It was great. But, uh, but in a, in a, in a, in a bit of weakness, I decided, ah, I don’t wanna deal with this hole in my exhaust.

I’ll take it to a shop and I’ll just let them do it. And, uh, they’ve had my car for about a month now. We went and we got it back after like two or three weeks. And, uh, it sounded just like all of the other trucks that come down the road. And it’s a Mercedes. It sounded like a diesel pickup truck. Nice. It sounded like the TT that one time.

So I, I call, oh, and they also cut my catalytic converter off, even though I didn’t ask for it.

That’s what they pay for. So that’s still the shop getting fixed. So we talked to [00:27:00] the shop. Wait, is it at the Mercedes? Is it at the Mercedes shop across the road? No, no, no, no. He did not take it to the Mercedes shop. He took it to an exhaust place. Is it the exhaust place across the street from the Rofo?

Yes. I’m getting it fixed. They’re, they’re very nice people. So we’re, hopefully it’ll be done this week. So that, that’s the latest on the Mercedes. So I have a couple other questions, some fun questions for you guys, since we’ve, we’ve talked at, you know, at length about this Volvo, but now that you’re a car, car people and Emily’s always been one, even though she doesn’t want to admit it.

Top three favorite cars of all time? Yes. I have a list and you can’t say the four 80 . She’s, she’s prepared. I have a list. So I like the Triumph Herald, the M-B-G-G-T, the 2002 MR two W, uh, W 10. So the earlier models, the, not like the, the, the later models that are curvy. The, the [00:28:00] Toyota MR two W 10. Yeah, he said 2002.

Sorry. Toyota. MR two. Sorry. I’m just excited. The BMW 2002 touring specifically in 1973 model, 1986 Volkswagen Golf GTI Mark 2, 1990s Peugeot 205 GTI. Sorry, I have like four more. No, go ahead. Um, you’re on a roll. Uh, pretty much any Gremlin. Uh, there was one for sale on Bring a Trailer that was gorgeous. It was purple and lime green and had a lovely, lovely paint job on it.

It went for cheap. It went for cheap and we didn’t get it. 1974 Datsun 260Z. Renault R5 GT Turbo, the Studebaker Lark, the two door wagon model, and now the brand new Nissan Z Proto. I’ve been eyeballing that one. The 400Z? That looks amazing. Aside from the rectangular front. We have a, we have a member that is Contemplating getting rid of his F Type Jag for a 400Z.

So we’re going to see if that’s going to happen. [00:29:00] Um, he says he has to sit in it first. He needs to know if he fits. So, so wow. That you’re, and yet you’re not a car person, you know, or whatever.

That’s a very, and that’s a very specific list, like 1986, mark two, not in 88 or a 92. It’s like, it, it’s gotta be in 86. It’s like, what? So I, so I, being around him long enough, I’ve started to spend time reading through the history with some of these cars and noticing the changes in that are made across model years.

And like some of ’em are very specific, like. If you’re going to get a year, this is the year that you’re going to get because it has the least amount of problems. It has the, the styling that everybody is looking for. So there’s, there’s a return on investment if you’re getting them. I don’t really care about the return on the investment part of it.

Like around the BMW 2002 versus the, uh, square light. It’s more about like what I like. I don’t care what other people like. I like. Specific [00:30:00] styles. I like the 1980s boxiness. I like the weird cars. I like the ugly cars that a lot of people don’t like. I still think the Aztec is absolutely horrid though.

And I think, oh, just wait. Just wait, wait. Hang on. Our ugly cars episode comes out. It’s a doozy. , what do you think of the HHR? I don’t think I’ve seen it. The Chevy. HHR ugly. It is the, it’s the Chevy PT Cruiser. Cruiser. Oh. Oh. No . Oh, no. Best car ever. So now we’ll flip the coin and go to Nate. So if you had a top three cars and you can’t be the Volvo 480, what would it be?

Huh? I, I, for a long time have lusted after a Porsche 911. I kick myself every day for not getting one like 10 or 15 years ago. Is there a specific year like Emily? Like it has to be a 1972 E model. I do have a specific year, uh, [00:31:00] mainly driven based on potential affordability. Um, I like the, uh, like 86 to 89 911 Carrera.

Right when they switched from, uh, what was it? The, the, the old gearbox, the new one. They went from the 915 and it’s got a 3. 2 liter. Yep. I’m a little bit of a Porsche person. Yeah. So I would love one of those. Um, but the prices are still, oh, they’re only going, they’re only going up. They’re only going up. I really love the Renault R5 Turbo 2.

That, again, is way out of price range for, like, ever affording. Uh, so I would settle for a Renault 5, R5 GT Turbo. Kind of looks like the R5 Turbo 2, but it’s not rear engined. It’s normal front engine front wheel drive. A Peugeot 205 GTI. I kind of like hot hatches, uh, but here’s a weird one, a Lotus Esprit Turbo.

Which version of it? The original [00:32:00] one or the later ones? The, the, the mid 80s ones. Yeah, because the Esprit came out in like the late 70s, so it all depends, you know. Uh, although I know that car would be a horrible car to own. Yes. Yeah, the only thing good about those cars is the transmission and it’s a terrible trans.

So I do like a lot of the Volkswagen, uh, type three styles, like the fastback or the square back ones at 411 to get like a, a square back and like rest of mod it with, uh, like a Subaru engine or something in the back. Well, obviously you need to shove a W12 in there somehow. 1. 8 turbo. I’m just saying.

Anyway, well that’s cool. So, okay, let’s, let’s do the, the million dollar man question, right? Which is, if you had all the money in the world, and you can only buy one car, what would it be? Um, I’m [00:33:00] not sure. That’s a hard one. Well, if we’re talking about all the money in the world, There were no r5 gt turbo. No, that’s her turbo too.

The real one the real one rear engine Yeah, I think that would be it because it’s all the money in the world and those cars are pretty expensive And it’s really cool to look at yeah, I They’re yeah I think that would be the one for me. Um Trying to think of something we might have seen at Oh, what was that?

The classic remis Uh, so what was it last year, the year before, I don’t know, it’s been so long. We’ve been married for two years. So let’s start with that. So two years ago, we went to Germany and we went to Classic Remise. Uh, so in Berlin, there’s this amazing old train station, train depot. It has been converted to workshop.

Slash collector [00:34:00] car storage museum slash museum. Yeah, and it’s free to the public to walk in and there’s workshops around the outside edge of craftsmen working on doing like pristine nut and bolt restorations on old Ferraris and Mercedes and things like that. And then there’s cars there in storage. Uh, they, they had one of the, what was that?

Uh, Volkswagen electric car from the 2000s or the, what was it called? The, Oh, no, that’s the one, the one was that it was also that it was, it wasn’t the three wheeled one, right? I don’t think so. Okay. It was, it was like the center seat. Really sleek one. They had one of those there. Uh, they had really old Lamborghinis and Porsches.

They had the Lancia Stratos. That would be a pretty cool car. If I had all the [00:35:00] money, they had one of those there. Speaking of Lancias, I, when I was looking and buying my Volvo Amazon, looking for old car that was weird and cheap. And met those requirements. Uh, I came across a Long Sia beta. Some guy had like three of them down in Virginia and they were all rust buckets.

Oh yeah, so over here they sold the Scorpion and they sold the Beta Monte Carlo. They’re both betas basically. They’re, they’re, you have to like that Panda, I call it the Panda front end because it’s got that, that ring around the lights, kind of like a DeLorean, you know, that whole deal. Yeah. But uh, yeah, they’re interesting little cars.

The last time I saw one of those that was running is when I watched Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo. So yeah. But uh, but at any rate, yeah, no, so that’s. That’s kind of cool. That’s interesting. I mean, we get answers from all over the place, but one of the ones that Brad usually likes to ask is in your opinion, the sexiest car of all time.[00:36:00]

Cool. Volvo 480.

Okay. So, so I’m going to say this because so Nate probably knows that I’m going to say, I believe it’s the mark two Stingray, the one that’s got the hips for miles. And I say that lovingly, like it’s the curves on that car are just beautiful for the era that it was made in. It was, it was very not practical.

And that’s, that’s my opinion. What makes those cars beautiful. It’s not beautiful by modern standards for car design. What did we see recently that Doug was talking about? And it was, it was beautiful. Yeah. I cannot remember, but that was the one that’s stuck in my head right now. Yeah. It’s it’s, it’s going to kill me, but Doug DeMuro reviewed a car recently.

That was just wonderful. Was that two? Is it 2020? [00:37:00] Right? No, we’ll figure out what it is. Like later tonight, wake up in the middle of the night and like scream it. Eventually you might hear it, but yeah, I, I like this thing. Right. I think they’re beautiful. I like. I like the old Porsche 356. I think those are some of the most beautiful cars.

Yeah, we’ll, we’ll flip it on its, on its nose. And you guys already kind of, you’ve kind of served this up in some respects, but the ugliest car in your opinion? I don’t think the Aztec is the ugliest. I think it is very ugly, but I do not think that it is the ugliest. I know. I’ll go first. Yeah. Um, I think one of the ugliest cars is the Nissan S Cargo.

All right. Looks like a snail. Yep. I don’t know. I can’t really think of one right now. [00:38:00] I don’t know. I, cars have to have character, and if it doesn’t have character, it’s, it’s not really a car. Like, a lot of people think of cars as just something to get them from point A to B, and they should really be more than that.

So, if you don’t enjoy looking at it, and you certainly don’t enjoy driving it, it’s not going to be a pretty car. It’s going to be an ugly car no matter what, from the inside out. Well, and that’s as an automotive enthusiast, it I die a little inside every day because so many people just want an appliance.

And so we just, the market gets flooded with an, with appliances, you know, other than the, the halo cars or, or some low production models, there aren’t that many truly sexy vehicles anymore that you can just walk in and buy. They’re all fairly bland. Um, I, I think the Nissan 400Z is like the, one of the most recent cars that I’ve seen that actually [00:39:00] Has a fairly attractive styling to it.

’cause it seems like all the other car makers have just been trying to outdo each other with like way too many lines and, and giant grills. and then things Oh, well what, like, like every new BMW these days, the M three, M four. Have you seen the, the picture that takes an X seven grill and puts it on the front of an E 30.

That’s, that’s a new F four. Yeah. Well, and then, and then it has an evolution of that that takes the X seven grill and just makes it the entire car with, yeah. I think the other thing that I dislike about current car design is that because of the popularity of SUVs, probably also due to the ever increasing safety standards and everything, cars just become bigger and heavier and like every car these days is kind of a crossover in look.

They all look like. A car that was put into a photocopier and put on [00:40:00] 150 percent zoom, like enlargement. I don’t call them crossovers. I call them compromises, you know, pretty much what they are. So I’m going to be in the boat where we’re probably buying our first crossover here very soon. But it will be unique.

Uh, because we, we are looking at buying one of the first release ID force by Volkswagen. So. It is a crossover style. I mean, I’ve, I’ve other than, you know, the trucks and SUVs I’ve had for towing and the truck I had right in college, everything else I’ve owned has been a sedan hatchback or wagon I’ve, I’ve never owned something in the crossover segment.

Dude. Once you go van life, that’s it. It’s over. Um, another car that I am really fascinated about and, uh, disappointed that like we don’t get a lot of cool cars here in the, in the U S. Being a kind of hatchback lover, you don’t get a lot of cool, small little cars. [00:41:00] The, the Honda e? Yeah, that’s it. Yes! The, are you familiar with the Honda e?

I am, and we just talked about this on the fourth episode of the drive thru. And my sister is a big fan of European hatchbacks as well, but she’s in the Fiat camp. And so recently there was a comparison between a rendering of Of the Fiat 126 electric and the Honda e and I hate to say the Fiat wins every day.

I don’t think I’ve seen that one. I’ll have to look it up. Brad might be able to find a picture of it. Oh, he’s got the escargot there, but I do think the Honda e is pretty cool. Um, I’d like the, the front grill headlight area. I like the fact that they’ve kind of made this the dashboard. And cluster kind of the seamless, uh, screen that goes across the dash.

Yeah. They, they tried that in the nineties, they tried that in the nineties with the prelude. So, you know, and then integrated the side mirrors as cameras, [00:42:00] uh, built into the screens on the dash. I think that’s pretty neat. So I’m looking, I’m looking at a photo of the Hyundai right now. It looks like a movie robot from the early two thousands.

Like it has that front end. It looks like it belongs in Wally. Yeah. Yes! Just straight out of the movie. It’s a friendly car. Children will love it. It’s different, you know. Uh, another cool, uh, EV is the Peugeot E Legend. Have you seen that one? It’s pretty. That one’s really cool. Yeah, you guys want a nerd on EVs, I gotta connect you with my sister cause she She goes hog wild on that.

When we do the drive through, it’s like, Oh God, there’s like a 10 of them we got to talk about, you know, it’s like her favorite is the Bugatti baby. Two 45, 000 for a kid’s toy.

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