Price: £9995
Mileage: 115,000
Condition: Fan-tango-tastic
Advert: Prestige Car Sales via Car & Classic
This, we think you’ll agree, is a proper Volvo. It’s funny actually – Volvo does still make big saloons and estates (despite threatening to whip them away a year or two back, before changing its mind), but say “Volvo” to any car enthusiast and we’d be surprised if the first car they thought of wasn’t one of the old boxy ones made between the 1970s and 1990s. Do the same with Ford or Peugeot or even Volkswagen and you’d have a lot more variation.
And of all the boxy Volvos, the 200 series is surely the most iconic. It ran between 1974 and 1993 in Europe and is the car around which the concept of moving large objects like wardrobes was created, in estate form at least. If you didn’t have a van for your antiques business, and couldn’t stretch to a W123-series Mercedes, you probably had a Volvo 200. A 240, of course, also formed the basis of the legendary ‘Flying Brick’ Group A racers of the mid-1980s.
This Volvo 244 we’ve found via Prestige Car Sales in Scarborough isn’t quite a Flying Brick, but it still has a few things that make it special. First, while not a first-year car, this 1975 model is a full half-century old this year. The 200 series really doesn’t seem that old, probably because Volvo was still making the things into the mid-1990s, and they were still a common sight on the roads of the early 2000s. The model may be 50 years old, but in our memories, this is a car from 20 years ago.
The next is the absolutely fantastic colour combination. This 244 has been Tango’d outside and in. Without a brochure handy or an enthusiastic Swede nearby to call upon, we can’t tell you the exact hue, but a bit of sleuthing suggests it was simply called ‘Orange’, which is a very sensible name for a very lurid colour. It suits the 244 perfectly, and it’s replicated everywhere from the carpets to the doorcards to the stripy seats. These 200s aren’t known for being particularly lively drives, but you’d struggle not to smile on every trip from the orange glow alone.
As a 244 DL, this one wasn’t quite at the bottom of the Volvo range, its 2.1-litre B21 inline-four lifting its performance above the basic 1.8s and 2.0s, and the DL (for De Luxe) trim providing better brakes and standard power steering over the simple L ‘Luxe’ version.
The interior is a model of clarity; check out those colour-coded switches on the dashboard, leaving you with absolutely no doubt as to which you’d just pressed. The gauge cluster is straightforward, too, and just like its Swedish compatriot Saab, Volvo was already exploring ways to make the steering wheel slightly less painful to collide with in an impact, so it has a huge padded centre section that looks big enough to house an airbag, even though it doesn’t.
It looks in fantastic condition, especially given its 115,000 miles. The ad suggests one of its owners (it isn’t clear which) had it for a full 42 of its 50 years, and there’s apparently a pile of history to back this up. It’s got a full year of MOT left on it and while its previous test was back in 2020, it’s otherwise pretty clean going back – there’s certainly nothing to make a new owner sweat.
Apart from maybe the price, but a fiver under £10K, no offers, doesn’t sound too bad to us. There can’t be many others in this condition, even considering the reputation for longevity that Volvos of this era enjoy. Fewer still will be so brightly coloured.
