Ambitious But Rubbish

My mother ended up buying that Volvo C70 mentioned in a previous thread. I took it out for a nice 100-km spin yesterday. I’m impressed.

Topless

First, the roof. It’s downright sexy! I know that Europeans and Brits have seen tons of these metal-folding-roof cars around for years, but they’re fairly new to North America — so far there are the Mercedes-Benz SL and SLK, the Volvo C70 and the yet-to-be-seen VW EOS (not chosen because dealers here can’t get their hands on one until December. With the exhorbitant premium we pay here in Canada you’d think that carmakers would get off their duff and make more cars available…).

The roof is hydraulic, and only electrically-assisted. This has a few implications in its operation. For one thing the engine has to be on before you can either retract or shut the roof. You also have to have your foot on the brake while this occurs. So, no closing the roof while walking away in a dramatic fashion, like you can do on a Saab 9-3 convertible. On the other hand if you have electrical problems the roof can, according to the salesman you can still at least close the roof. I am a little skeptical of the claim. I will have to root through the owner’s manual later to figure out how that could be done.

In any case, the roof takes slightly less than 30 seconds to either retract or close. You just sit there with your foot on the brake and your finger on the appropriate button (located at the rear of the center console) and it works its magic — the boot opens “backwards”, the roof unlocks and separates into three panels, and is spirited away. The operation does shake the car up a bit, which gives you a hint that what you have is a full, heavy metal roof.

For a car with a large metal roof, it’s surprising to see that you do have some boot space while the roof is down. This is partly due to the C70 being a front-wheel-drive car, and also partly due to the spare tire being a “free option” and not standard equipment (you do get an emergency tire inflate-and-patch kit, though). Cleverly enough there’s an additional tray in the boot that goes over your luggage. If the tray can close to a prescribed height then you’ll be able to retract the roof; otherwise a safety mechanism prevents the system from engaging.

Once you have the roof down you can still have access to your luggage by pushing a yellow button on the side of the boot opening. This lifts the roof up a bit so you can grab your stuff, but I’m skeptical that you could get large bags out that way.

I’m one who never saw the attraction behind convertibles. I mean sure, in the summer when it’s sunny it’s great, but besides maybe two months in the year drop-tops are a bit of a pain in the bum with a soft roof that must necessarily be colder in winter and noisier on the road, must be replaced when the inevitable instance of rot sets in and presents thieves with a car that can be opened in seconds with a swiss army knife, besides being offering a rather unpleasant appearance when the roof is up. In this case such downsides are non-existent! The metal roof makes this car a closed car when the roof is up, both inside and out, and the security system takes you by surprise by coming to life when you put your bags on the back seat when you’ve locked the car, making it a bit of a fortress even if you leave it with the roof down. This is one seriously well-thought-out vehicle.

Styling

Although its front grille clearly links it with other Volvo models, and despite its sharing the same platform as Volvo’s S40, V50 and C30 offerings, this car was styled by Pininfarina and is built by a special Volvo-Pininfarina partnership venture. For those not up on this sort of thing, Pininfarina has been Ferrari’s stylist since the 60′s. This hugely contributes in giving the C70 its slick and sporty good looks. The larger boot necessary to house the roof makes the car look a lot bigger than an S40, although in terms of length it’s really only 4.4 inches longer and thus as easy to park.

Volvo Means Safe

As you’d expect from Volvo, this car has all sorts of safety system to keep you from dying from driver stupidity, either your own or others’. The car comes equipped with the usual airbags, plus side airbags that stay inflated in case you roll over. If you do roll over two beams behind the rear passenger seats shoot up to keep a good amount of ground clearance in the event that your car should end up wheels-up. Hopefully I’ll never have to report whether or not these work as advertised. The A-pillars are also reinforced to they should resist bending in that eventuality. I assume this latter is a standard feature in convertibles nowadays, and if it isn’t it should be.

The Interior

This car has all optional packages already — the few things we’re missing are the sat-nav and the audio jukebox, which is a sort of “iPod for your car” kind of thing. That means we have leather, electric heated seats with 3 memory settings, a 6-CD changer, dual-zone climate control, AUX input for an MP3 player, DynAudio, etc. DynAudio is a Swedish audio equipment maker, a sort of B&O but from further north, who have devised for the C70 an audio system that makes the stereo sound as good with the top down as it does with the top up. And surprisingly enough the system delivers, although you have to remind yourself to lower the volume once you get off the highway and into a residential area, as the DynAudio system has two big and powerful subwoofers behind the rear seats which could potentially wake the dead.

The seats are comfortable and adjustable six ways from Sunday, as are the rear-view mirrors, and unlike some other drop-tops you can actually see very well out the back whether the roof is up or down.

The rear seats are also a very pleasant surprise. I can fit comfortably there, and I’m a big guy with wide shoulders. I wouldn’t fit two of me in the back, but I and a normal-sized person would have enough space to allow for mundane things like, you know, breathing and such. The legroom is decent too, although this depends on the position of the front seats; still it’s a good deal better than all four-seater convertibles I’ve seen on the street.

The interior is also crammed with all sorts of compartments into which you can put your valuables. Those lock when you walk away from the car with the roof down, which is another nice touch.

On the Road

The true pleasure of a car is, of course, in the driving. Most reviews I’ve seen talk a lot about torque steer. Apparently it’s bad enough with this model to have scared Jeremy Clarkson into driving sheepishly. Personally I haven’t noticed much of it. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been driving FWD cars for so long that I’m just used to it. I used to drive a 300M which featured a V6 cranking out 255 bhp, so the C70′s not-quite-220 bhp doesn’t scare me.

Still the car can be surprisingly aggressive for a model that’s not being marketed as a sports car. The C70 in its (only) T5 trim has a 2.5L 5-cylinder engine equipped with a high-pressure turbocharger. Obviously as a front-wheel-drive car it is prone to torque-steer if you use the throttle aggressively from a standing start; still, I find it surprising that someone who’s driven supercars like a madman — as Clarkson has — should find in the C70 cause to be hesitant. Maybe he was off his driving form on that day.

Now, a little detail about driving a T5, which should (normally) be the same for all Volvo models with this engine: the engine revs fairly low revolutions while idling, less than 1000 rpm. With the automatic model the gears shifts up in the low 2000s. I prefer to shift manually using the autostick feature, keeping the revs between 2000 and 4000 (when passing). This seems to keep the turbocharger on all the time; past 3000 you can actually hear the turbine’s high-pitched whine, which is a bit of a bonus for someone who’s driving his first turbo-charged car. For the average driver, though, the turbo kick is easily controlled by being careful with the throttle pedal. I think Clarkson was being a bit of a ninny when he tried it In automatic mode the turbo boost allows you to easily pass annoyingly slow drivers on the highway or get out of the way if you see an accident happening in front of you.

Braking is also a breeze thanks to four large disc brakes that have standard ABS (of course) and an additional adaptive braking system that prevents the car from going a bit sideways while hard-braking. Take it from someone who’s hard-braked with the 300M, this system is very handy indeed, and just the thing you need in an emergency situation.

Overall the C70 is also a very stiff car. Normally you’d expect convertibles to be a little soft suspension-wise, but not this one; the shocks are not quite as uncomfortably hard as they were on the 300M Special, but close, and certain kind of narrow speed-bumps result in more of a jolt with the C70 than I remember them with the 300M; in both cases the wheels are 18-inch aluminium rims with low-profile tires, although I had put BF Goodrich G-Force T/A’s on the Chrysler and the Volvo has Pirelli P-Zeros, so that might be a factor. Still, even on hard curves you don’t see the amount of body roll that you’d expect from a non-sport car, although I’ll have to test this more in time.

The transmission itself is all right. It’s very smooth in automatic mode, and changes gears reasonably quickly in manual mode. It’s not as fast as the tranny on the 300M, but it’s got that one more gear that the 300M should have had. There’s also a “W” option which is a bit mystifying at first. This is a gear limiter that you should use when you have to plow your way out of a foot of snow; it keeps the revs and torque at a very low level so you can get to a non-buried bit of road. Obviously I haven’t had occasion to use this yet in July, but according to the Volvo salesman it keeps the engine in check even if you stomp on the throttle. I’ll have to wait 6 or 7 months to see how well this works.

So far all signs point to the C70 being a very solid, safe and pleasant car. It’s still brand-new (< 250km) so the throttle and brake feel a little bit rough but that bit should go away shortly. I’m still not quite convinced that it’s worth all that it costs in Canada, but those things are relative to the price of other cars — like the Audi A4, BMW 3-series and Saab 9-3 — and seen on that metric the C70 delivers. I’ll have more on the subject as I give the car a more thorough going-over.