Here’s The Italian-Designed Car That Volvo Should Have Replaced The Iconic P1800 With

“The client will never pick this,” says my boss as he looks over some well-thought-out concept our design department has just developed. “It just makes too much sense.” It sounds strange, but he’s right. Oftentimes corporate minds make decisions of the what-were-they-thinking variety, and car companies are famous for this. For example, Pontiac paraded some nice looking all-activity concept vehicles in front of us, and then chose to produce the rather ham-fisted design of the Aztek. The European and Australian arms of Ford and General Motors produced some outstanding machines that challenged the best the world had to offer, yet they decided not to sell them here. Worse than that, in cases like the Merkur XR4Ti and Cadillac Catera, they did offer them to Americans but with issues like underwhelming drivetrains that hindered their chance for success. I think Volvo’s designers missed some opportunities in the seventies that were right in front of them; let’s talk about them.

I”m talking about the brand’s chance to improve its cool factor. I’m about to look at an alternate reality, as I typically do, but somehow the actual history of Volvo seems even stranger than the fiction I’ll present. Allow me to explain.

A Very Pretty Sports Car…By Volvo?

In 1973, Volvo’s P1800 series of sports cars was over a decade old, with a chassis based on the even older 122 “Amazon” series. As a sports car with sweeping lines that was conventionally beautiful, the P1800 was a rather enigmatic car for Volvo. It’s also a rare car in that it has tail fins that actually work visually without looking gaudy or stuck on. Another strange fact: Jason Torchinsky actually owned one, and it’s hard to imagine him ever purchasing a car that is “conventionally beautiful” in this reality. It might have been a lovely looking and relatively sporting car, but a P1800S beat out taxi-cab-like Benz diesels to hold the record for the highest mileage ever put on a car with 3.2 million on the clock (and New York-based owner Irv Gordon didn’t even have a garage). It was still a Volvo, after all.

With looming safety and emissions restrictions in the United States, Volvo chose to drop this by-now-aging car instead of developing a new 1974 model. The last of the P1800 series was a “shooting brake” model Volvo developed from the coupe with an all-glass backlight.

Dubbed the 1800ES, this rare last-of-the-line car (only 8,077 produced) served as a styling inspiration for a number of Volvo cars, including later front wheel drive sport coupes (but not really sports cars) such as the 480 and C30.

After the last 1800ES left the factory, Volvo’s apparent need for a “halo” car led them to coachbuilder and styling house Bertone to make their next special coupe. Did Lamborghini Countach stylist and Bertone employee Marcello Gandini create a slick, low, and angular two door performance machine for Volvo’s next flagship GT? That would make sense, right? I certainly think so, but that isn’t what happened.

You might remember a little while back that we talked about the Volvo Bertone Coupe that did actually reach production. The 262C was styled not in Turin but in-house at Volvo, and the inspiration for the design of this coupe appears to have been vinyl-roof-covered American personal luxury cars. Bertone simply produced the car in Italy, literally chopping down the roof of a standard two door like some Kustom Kar house would. Whether you like it or not, the 262C didn’t sell particularly well and was absolutely not a sports-car replacement for the 1800ES.

Volvo did get a Bertone show car in 1980 called the Tundra. This fastback (with somewhat odd rear quarter windows) seemed to point a new direction for styling of the Swedish firm. Needless to say, this rather radical-for-the-time concept was too much for the rather conservative maker of boxy cars. Volvo passed on producing the design, though Bertone did present a very similar design to a company with the balls to produce it: serial bizarre-car-maker Citroen. The BX model followed a very similar aesthetic.

What if Volvo had received the kind of Bertone-designed sports car we all thought we would be getting?

Brown Pyramid Or Poop Emoji?

If you like angular styling like I do, Bertone had more cool concepts in the late seventies than you could shake a pencil at. At almost exactly the same time that the 262C was launched in 1978, Bertone showed the Lancia Sibilo at that year’s Turin Auto Show.

This dramatic wedge (in a glorious brown) was what you would expect from Bertone and Gandini: an insanely futuristic concept. The upper half of the car was done in a formed polycarbonate plastic so there were no window seams; the areas where you don’t want to see through the clear plastic are painted body color from the inside to hide any structure. To allow the driver to get some air or pay tolls, there are small round window openings–they slide back inside the car to open. A vertical bar windshield wiper moves laterally across the screen to give full coverage of the glass. In back there’s a “heckblende” panel between the taillights with SIBILO spelled out in Jason’s favorite font: seven-segment digital.

It’s odd that the Sibilio is based on the unearthly-sounding rally machine Lancia Stratos, since it looks more like a shooting brake than a mid-engined supercar. That has to be one of my favorite sounding motors but I sure as shit don’t want that engine right in the car with me.

I kept looking at the rear quarter view of the Sibilo and personally wanted to make some changes, and once I started scribbling something odd occurred to me: the Sibilio was starting to look like a latter day 1800ES. Here’s how the Sibilio could be “Volvoized” into a two-plus-two front engined GT car called the 2800EX..

Bertone-d Down 

To make a late-seventies sports vehicle, Volvo couldn’t realistically use 200 series bits; the only other parts bin choice might have to be heavily modified components from the new-for-1976 300 series, which in many ways wasn’t totally a Volvo.

The Dutch firm DAF was best known for rubber belt transmission cars that raced backwards, so it seemed sort of odd when Volvo bought an interest in the company, ultimately taking full control in 1975. The 300 series was essentially a collaboration with DAF that the Swedish firm used to make a Volvo entry into the small-car market, and many fans of the brand don’t accept it as a “real” Volvo. Still, we have to run with what we’ve got, and this is it.

At least the 300 does have a rear-mounted manual transmission for outstanding weight distribution, a layout the concurrent Porsche 924 and Alfa GTV used as well. I’d love to use the straight six out of the old Volvo 164 but we’ll likely need to use the dreaded PRV V6 or a B21 four-cylinder Volvo engine, specifically later models with the turbo. Still, with that V6 you’d have the same engine as the rear-motor Renault Alpine (and later Delorean) but theoretically with more predictable handling. I’d like to at least put an extra set of camshafts on that dopey old motor. The rear mounted transmission could be a 5 speed or a 4-speed-with-overdrive as on the 200 series. A 3-speed automatic would be available as an option–not that crazy Variomatic belt transmission from DAF, thank you.

Modifications I made to the Sibilo body are rather simple but make it a more usable, producible design. The seamless windows obviously have to go, but we can keep the glass seams as tight as seventies technology could do. I’ve opened up the rear wheel by removing the “skirt”; I then lengthened that peak on the rear wheel arch to sort of emulate the remains of the “fin” on the flanks of the 1800ES. The taillights and odd logo panel of the Sibilo always seemed a bit out of place, so I moved more Volvo-looking lights down and integrated them into the body with a “heckblende” between them. Rubber bumper protrusions take care of US 5MPH regulations.

In front, the sloping nose is still there but the continuous pyramid-like straight line from front bumper to roof on the Sibilo is broken, with a slightly more upright front windshield. A small hood bulge will likely be needed to clear the motor. A mock Volvo grille sits in the center of the bumper with the signals and fog lamps flanking it. Headlamps are still pop ups since I would never willingly NOT put pop ups on anything that would have existed before 1985. Sadly, the sliding bar wiper won’t hold up to Swedish snow, so more conventional blade mechanisms are used.

And You Thought That The Outside Was Weird

When people ask the question of which cars had the most bizarre interior design of all time, the common answers like Citroen or Subaru XT don’t even come close to scratching the surface of dashboards of Bertone concepts of the seventies. The Sibilo was no exception; a giant cylinder was plopped in front of the driver, the rim of which apparently steered the car. For whatever reason, Bertone chose to throw the radio speaker and warning lights on the flat surface in the center of the wheel, simulating Milton Bradley’s Simon. Note also the mechanism that opens the little round window on the door (below).

I think such a control center is a bit too much for any Volvo, so I just used the basic angular aesthetic of the Sibilo and put it in the blender with the lovely dashboard of the original P1800. That car had chrome bezels surrounding the secondary instruments in the center of the dash; Jason claimed that those green centers of the gauges glowed like an illuminated swimming pool at night.

Here’s what the Mix-O-Matic produced. I’ve created a much more conventional trapezoidal shaped dashboard with angular interpretations of those cool old-school instruments placed inside. There are also parts-bin sourced climate and secondary controls that will look very familiar to anyone who rode in a 245DL back in the day. Because I am not sure if the side windows could roll all the way down, we’ll use AMC Pacer-style “fins” on the door for you to rest your arm on.

Exactly why would the 2800EX have even existed? It’s not like the world needed another Volvo sports car, especially a rather controversial looking one like this, but wouldn’t it have made more sense than the 262C that they had the Italian firm actually build? That’s a car that confuses people to this very day. If I’m buying a Bertone creation from the seventies, I expect it to be a low, lean, batshit crazy spectacle that looks like it’s escaped from the set of Space 1999.

What good would it be if it isn’t?

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