From the archives…
or the hard drive full of photos from back before Geoff Buys Cars was Geoff Buys Cars
Years before Geoff Buys Cars began, I was buying cars here and there but not on an industrial scale. It was still the mixture of Swedish and German metal that would grace my driveway, and I’d always hankered after a Volvo 850 T5…
This one popped up on Facebook Marketplace in Redditch for the princely sum of £600, and rough though it was, I had to go check it out. This was probably 2017, so before the prices on T5’s went haywire, but even so, at £600, it was a cheap car.
I got to the chaps house and he made a lot of excuses about the state of the car, and it was an odd one. The cabin had what looked like a house light switch stuck underneath the dashboard, which was crudely wired to the fan under the bonnet, meaning the fan could be manually controlled but the wiring was an unbelievable bodge job. It was leaking oil from virtually everywhere and was long overdue a clean, plus the alloy wheels were really badly painted black.
On the test drive the car was coughing and spluttering like a pig, which I thought felt like bad or old fuel… Even so the seller was mortified, and was so desperate for the space he asked if I could take it away for £250 instead of the £600 asking price. Needless to say that was a deal, it was cheap at the full asking price so I couldn’t give him the cash fast enough.
Driving home the car started to perform a lot better, after I thad warmed up and got a bit more fuel in the tank. I decided to google ‘Volvo Specialist Bromsgrove’ to see if I could take it somewhere for a once over.
A garage popped up on Google claiming to be a Volvo specialist, so 20 minutes later we pulled onto the forecourt. I said something like ‘do you know much about these old things?’ And the garage owner gave me one of those looks that said ‘you can fit what I don’t know about Volvos on a postage stamp, sonny Jim’, before he walked over and said ‘you can fit what I don’t know about Volvos on a postage stamp, sonny Jim’ in a really patronising voice. I asked him to give the car a look over, and we popped off for a coffee.
Later that day we returned to the garage, where the owner proudly proclaimed I had bought the worst Volvo 850 T5 he had ever, ever seen. According to him, there were no redeeming features to discuss at all, just rust and leaks. Fair enough.
One car wash and some nice photo later and the car went up on eBay. After two people came to view and then ran a mile, three likely lads turned up in an old Mercedes-Benz and I thought to myself ‘these are my people’.
They were a little younger than me, the sort of guys I’d like to have been if I’d been less busy chasing girls and waves. Past regrets aside, I watched the process. One of them (the driver) smoked cigarettes and generally just hung out, the other looked at the car in some sort of detail whilst the third dude searched Facebook Marketplace to try and find another car to buy on their way back up to whichever sun-deprived Northern town from whence they came. Turns out they only wanted to put the engine in a Ford Sierra, so we did a deal and I was suddenly no longer the owner of the World’s Worst Volvo 850 T5.
Did you buy my Volvo, or do you know where it is now? Get in touch!
Unless it blew up on the way home, in which case, it was probably a different Volvo.
