Today’s Nice Price or Crack Pipe Volvo is partially Vegan. It’s also brown, a wagon and rocks the right number of pedals, but will its asking have asking where’s the beef?
Unsurprisingly yesterday’s 1995 - that was 20 years ago! - Mercedes C36 AMG brought it home with a massive 88% Nice Price win for its fifty-eight hundred price tag.
That however, was because the seller left an important bit of information out of the ad, which was that the car came with a salvage title. Eff him, and I’m still clamping my hands over my ears and humming nahnahnahnahnahnah to myself while I pretend the car isn’t a damn scam.
Of course if you spend your whole life blocking out sounds you’ll miss a lot of cool music. One song that I think was pretty cool was a ditty called Vegetables by the Beach Boys. It was also covered by another surf band, Jan and Dean but I like the Beach Boys version better because it has actual vegetable chomping sounds on it.
I was thinking about that song while looking over this 1982 Volvo 245 because it is not only a diesel but has been also fitted with a 16-gallon secondary fuel tank under the hatch and that can be filled with the dregs from last night’s kale chips and fried sorghum fest for a secondary - and probably very tasty-smelling - fuel source.
Yep, here SVO isn’t Special Vehicles Operation - that would be Ford - but Straight Vegetable Oil. Apparently the VW D24 under the hood is pretty nondiscriminatory when it comes to what it’s willing to burn. There are some other unique aspects to that mill too, but we’ll get to those in a sec.
First however, let’s looks at the rest of the car. Overall, the body looks straight but a bit on the tired side. The paint is park-it-outside hazy with a faded pinstripe topping each fender line. On the plus side, there don’t seem to be any holes here that aren’t supposed to be there, and all the glass seems to be intact.
Inside, there’s just about every earth-tone shade that Volvo produced back in the day. The major theme here is beige, however the front two thrones are mismatched to the rest of the car and the driver’s side sports a seat cover that reminds me of Melissa McCarthy in The Heat wanting to know just exactly what Sandra Bullock’s ‘Spanx’ are holding in.
Yeah, it’s rough both inside and out, but it’s a Volvo 200-series, and those are the automotive equivalent of ‘80s slasher movie killers in their tenacity and difficulty in killing, right?
Yeah, okay.
Let’s see what really sucks about this killer. That Volkswagen diesel is said in the ad to sport, along with the indiscriminate fuel predilection, a spankin’ new set of glow plugs and a fresh head gasket. However, it apparently could stand either a shot of Engine Rebuild in a Can, or more likely, a new set of piston rings as it’s claimed to smoke like a cheap detective.
The ad says that an extra $300 on top of the car’s purchase price will buy you a decent mill, but you’re going to have to put it in. That means having to deal with all the craptacularly bad wiring and a freaking plastic gas can that’s presently Borg-ing up the engine bay. On the plus side the ad says that it runs great, if smokily, and it does sport a stick. We like sticks, right?
As an alternative to the engine switch you could just rung whatcha brung and pretend you’re James Bond leaving the bad guys in a cloud of smoke. To do that you’ll only need to come up with $1,495, and maybe some vegetable oil, you know, to get home.
What’s your take on this stoic Volvo, its fuel options and that $1,495 price? Could you totally see Rachael Ray pulling into a service station in this and saying “fill it up with EVOO?” Or, is this a vegi-volvo that’s just not too tasty at that price?
You decide!
eBay out of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, or go here if the ad disappears.
H/T to dasboot for the hookup!
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