2021 and all that!
Well I’m afraid 2021 turned out to be not such a good year car wise. It marked the end of over 14 years of ownership of one Mercedes A class (Arfer) and getting on for 9 years of ownership of the A210 (Alfred). Arfer our long term A140 came to grief due to a momentary lapse on my part into the back of a Land Rover Discovery (which suffered no ill effects!) but took out the A class’ bonnet, radiator, A/C matrix and pump and would’ve cost £4500 to repair so the insurance company wrote him off! A sad end to almost 15 years of continuous ownership!
Bugger!
Condor Ferries were as good as gold and repatriated our ‘oh so lonely’ A210 from St. Malo (see Google streetview from 2020/early 2021 images below!) to Jersey and he was serviced and re-commissioned but almost 18 months of inactivity clearly took their toll as the electronically controlled ‘tiptronic’ gearbox kept going into ‘limp mode’ so the time had come to say goodbye and have an upgrade (in fairness we did have 'Alfred' for almost 9 years!).
J was instrumental in finding our new car (the costs of importing something from the UK ruled that out which was a shame as I'd seen some nice Benz's) so we looked locally and found a rather nice 10 year old but extremely good condition and very low mileage (24k miles) Volvo C30 ‘R-design’ T5. That’s a nicely specced 2.5 litre 5 cylinder turbocharged coupe, taking many styling cues from ‘the Saint’ descended P1800ES estate of the early 70’s. I recall sitting in a P1800ES in the Seymour Horwell garage in Newton Abbot in the very late 70’s and thinking what a nice car it was!! And so we have our lovely new car which even J is delighted with (!) and it is frankly FULL of character and has a very nice engine and exhaust note under acceleration (and just a hint of turbo whistle!).
PS I was frankly amazed to see that on paper our C30 T5 can out accelerate and is generally faster and more powerful than other old favourite the 1970’s Alfa Romeo Montreal coupe and not a million miles off the late 70's Porsche 928..., wow!
New to us Volvo now carries a 'Saint' sticker and christened 'Roger'!