Volvo P1800 - Family Secrets

I kick myself over never asking that cook in the hospital kitchen I worked in when I was in college why he had one of these. Just as well. Rather than hear some story about it being an uncle's hand-me-down, just something he bought on the cheap or he bought it because he was a fan of some long off the air British TV show, I'd rather not know anything about why and how he came to have one. At best, I can only hope that he appreciated these cars for what they were and went to great lengths to keep it running.

For me personally, I've always loved them and could care less they were made famous in TV show. When I'd tell some people these are one of my favorite cars of all time, they look at me incredulously when I tell them I had no idea they were featured in some TV show.  My appreciation for these cars much like my young sons appreciating black and gold Pontiac Trans Am's without their having any idea they were made famous in some movie. After all, cool is cool and it's timeless.

Anyway, to people of a certain vintage, these Volvo's are memorable because Roger Moore's character in the 1960's British TV series, "The Saint" drove one. Also turns out he drove the car used in the series as his personal daily driver back then. Does begs the question as to whether or not he actually liked the car that much or it was all a publicity stunt for the show.

As far as the cars go, in the 1950's, legend has it Volvo wanted a sports car as a way to increase showroom traffic and shed what even back then was a dowdy, frumpy image. While their first attempt, a two passenger, plastic bodied, rolling bathtub called the Volvo Sport (above) was a complete failure, their second attempt became an instant classic.

Using a shortened wheelbase version of the already well established Volvo 122, Volvo commissioned Italian design house Pietra Frura to pen the lines of the 1800 - named for its 1.8 liter, in line four cylinder engine. What's odd is that while Pietra Frura came up with four designs for Volvo executives to choose from, the design Volvo chose was actually done by the son of Volvo's head of engineering who, another legend has it, was moonlighting as a designer at Pietra Frura. Weird. I know. Volvo kept the fact that their "Italian designed" sports car was actually designed by a Swede a secret for fifty years. Ah, but such is the stuff of family secrets, y'know?

Well, marketing the 1800 as "Italian designed" had to have part of the plan to make the car even more avant garde. Whomever designed these, and it's simple elegance bespeaks to a design done by a small group of designers if not indeed one person, came up with, arguably, one of the most beautiful and still to this day underappreciated automobile designs of the twentieth century. And, on top of all that, it's a forward thinking Volvo. Wow.

Adding to the 1800's mystique was that for most of its life, Volvo didn't have the factory capacity to produce them. From 1961-1968, "Pressed Steel", a British metal works company built the bodies and British car maker Jensen assembled those bodies to chassis, shells and running gear shipped from Sweden. So, a Volvo supposedly designed in Italy and built in England certainly made for what could be construed by some as a near exotic. Even if it was little more than a 122 with a sexy body bolted on it.

Despite the acclaim that the design of the 1800 got, though, regardless of whomever designed it, no other Volvo of the era, or since save, debatabley, for the "shooting brake" C30 they sold between 2007 and 2013, has shared any of its design moxie. That's a shame too considering how wonderful looking these cars were. Family secret and all.