I've been driving a 2001 Volvo S40 1.9t this week and how Swede it is.
Which, unlike the days when Volvos were designed by the same folks who did the blueprints for Union Pacific boxcars, is a very good thing.
A friend of mine who's been a Volvo owner for years laid her eyes on my "peacock green" (kind of a bluish green) tester last week and declared, "That's a cute car. What kind is it?"
When I told her it was the same brand she's been driving since the 1980s, she was shocked. The diagonal bar across the grille is the only vestige left of Volvos past. "I never would have recognized it," she said.
Neither would a lot of people. The folks in Goteborg have gone Hollywood, or at least the Swedish version of it. Swoops and curves and bolder color schemes have replaced creases, right angles and basic beige.
But you can't please everyone. The true believers, those who have been marching to Volvo's different drummer since the 1960s, have not totally embraced the new look.
They grump that Volvos should be the equivalent of the Swiss Army knife: spare, utilitarian, form follows function and all that. And they like their new Volvo to look just like the one they bought the year that the Beatles released their Sgt. Pepper album.
But at some point prior to Ford buying Volvo in January 1999, the corporate bigwigs decided that maybe they couldn't go on making a living on the same old group of tree huggers and granola crunchers. They needed to bring new blood into the Volvo fold and that meant they had to stop making Volvos look like the box they came in.
The result has been good. It's not as though they went out and hired a bunch of 20-somethings and gave them carte blanche to design a new Batmobile or something. The new Volvos are still pretty conservative cars, just not as conservative.
More radical than the body styling are the changes under the hood. The 1.9t in my tester's moniker means that the car is motivated by a 1.9 liter, 160 horsepower, four-cylinder engine with a light pressure turbocharger. I don't know what the addition of the turbo does to your insurance or the longevity of the car. But Volvo says it will accelerate from zero to 60 mph in 8.5 seconds and I think they're being conservative there. It feels faster than that, more like the V6 engines in some competitors.
It seems to me that the Volvo S40, being a European car, after all, should be considered competition for the BMW 3 Series or the Mercedes-Benz C Class. The look, the feel, the performance and quality control certainly put it in a position of compete against those high-end rides.
But the S40's pricing places it more in a league with loaded Honda Accords and Toyota Camrys, the bread and butter cars of the great middle-class import market ("import" being a relative term since most of them are assembled these days in such exotic foreign locales as Ohio and Kentucky.)
Base price for my tester was $23,500, but the special metallic paint added $400, a "value" package of luxury goodies upped the ante another $1,900 and destination charges of $575, put the bottom line at $26,375, which is more than you'll pay for an Accord or Camry but thousands less than anything coming out of the German stables whose name doesn't start with a V.
Actually, the base S40 is very nicely equipped with just the standard equipment, which includes four air bags, five seat belts, a mega-stereo with cassette and CD player, cruise control, tilt steering, remote keyless entry, five cup holders, a split and folding rear seat; power locks, windows and mirrors; and five padded head restraints. Incidentally, these head rests are the best in the world. Buy a Volvo and you can forget about whiplash if someone rear-ends you. It won't happen.
Fuel mileage is rated at 22 mpg in city driving and 32 mpg on the highway, pretty decent for a car with sporting pretensions. Just keep your foot light on the pedal (and the turbo from doing too much force-feeding of fuel) and you should hit those numbers quite easily.
You should also know that the S40 sedan also comes in a station wagon version called the V40. It's basically the same car but with the usual wagon versatility and extra cargo capacity. The downside is it's not as cool looking as the four-door sedan which many (but not BMW owners, of course) might mistake as one of Munich's highly-desirable "Ultimate Driving Machines" as BMW's marketing mavens term them.
The S40's interior is nicely laid out and everything is self-explanatory except the radio. Volvo has gone to an odd system for setting radio stations that I only half deciphered. Instead of buttons labeled 1, 2, 3, etc., they have a knob that you turn and push or something. And it took about 10 minutes to find the AM mode to listen to the end of the BYU vs. San Diego State football game and even then it was just an accident that I found it.
I just kept pushing and turning the knobs until I blundered into Paul James. (And I turned it off after Owen Pochman kicked that 50-yard field goal with 50 seconds left under the illusion that the Y. had won the game. Imagine my surprise later that evening when I got the word.)
Although the S40 is a four-door sedan and the back seat is cleverly laid out to nicely accommodate two grown-ups (by indenting the back of the front seats and allowing plenty of toe room under them) five adults would be pretty cramped.
About the S40's pedigree. Although Volvo is still a Swedish company, it's owned by America's FoMoCo, and the car is actually built in Born, Netherlands. It also has a touch of Japanese heritage since it got some design help from Mitsubishi and it uses a Mitsubishi transmission. Also, Mitsu is using the same platform for one of its own cars, called the Carisma, which is sold only in Europe.
Ride and handling of the S40 are first rate. As always, the seats are, in Goldilocks' words, just right. The doors are strong but very light, making them easy to open and close. The trunk is not huge but larger than you might expect for a small sports sedan.
If you're in the market for a small sports sedan, you should check out the Volvo S40. And if you can figure out how the radio works, let me know. On second thought, never mind. By then I won't remember anyway.
E-mail: max@desnews.com