Tag: bertone

1979 Volvo Bertone 262C. Now With More V8!

Jeremy Nutt 3 Comments

Just when I thought that last night’s Volvo Bertone was the sweetness, I come across this!  “Shut up and take my money!” is the first thing that comes to my mind. Seriously? $2000 for a 1979 Bertone with a V8 under the hood?  Am I being punk’ed? Does such Swedish-Italian coolness normally come this cheap? Does the SBC really kill the value this much?

Okay, let’s all take a deep breath and slow things down a tick.  What we are dealing with today is a 1979 Volvo Bertone 262C… as you can clearly see.  These cars CAME this way, 2 inch chopped roof and all.  Rad? Heck yes. It’s just like that Volvo that your friend’s mom had way back in the day, but built with Italian styling. The power options inside still work, it has been restored at some point in life, and it has a Chevy V8 swap.  On one hand, this swap is preposterous and shameful. On the other hand, it is a perfect mechanical symphony that is rarely heard or seen.  An automotive cornucopia it is. Take a boxy Swedish car that is well known for safety and reliability, and give it fancy Italian bodywork. Then rip all of its spinny bits out, and install American gas guzzling reliability. I must say, I am into this one deep. If my driveway is miraculously larger when I get home today, and two G’s in cash rains down from the sky on my way home, you can bet I will be cruising the streets in this thing.  This week, it is Bertone Volvo’s for the ultimate, and clearly inescapable win.

Craigslist Listing – http://worcester.craigslist.org/cto/2738253353.html

A Volvo 780 Coupe Spotted in the Wild

Jeremy Nutt 2 Comments

Just a few hours ago, I was out and about, doing a little Christmas shopping. On one trip into a parking lot, I happened to lay my eyes upon the back side of a car that looked … well… oddly out of place.  It just did not belong in the sea of beige Camry’s and Minivans. My glance happened so quickly though, that I couldn’t seem to place what the heck I had just seen. As I rounded the endless rows of the parking lot, while dodging rogue carriages, my memory was feverishly flipping pages of magazines that I had read decades ago, hoping to determine the nature of this machine. Obviously, being a stalker of unique automobiles, I had to move in for a closer look.

As it turns out, what I had spotted was in fact a unique piece of history. It was a late 1980’s Volvo 780 Bertone Coupe! Not your everyday vehicle for sure. From what I understand, these things are fairly rare with only something like 8500 of them being built over 4 years.  That’s fairly rare if you ask me, especially when you consider that they were spread out over a few different continents.  Seeing one in person these days is a sweet stroke of luck. With under 200 horsepower, they certainly weren’t race cars, but they sure were classy looking, in their boxy 1980’s sort of way.