1980 Volvo GL Tested: Sedan Done Right

From the April 1980 issue of Car and Driver.

Each year since 1976 has seen a worthwhile improvement in the overall quality of Volvo cars. For ten years be­fore that they were to be prized mainly for their nuisance value, so notoriously troublesome and unreliable were they. This didn’t stop Volvophiles from singing their praises to the skies, but the uniquely durable affection of Volvo owners during the years 1967-1976 is a tribute more to Volvo advertising and public relations than to Volvo automo­tive products. Well, not entirely. Volvo products from 1957 to 1966 were abso­lutely above reproach—perhaps the best cars imported in the United States during that decade—and there’s little doubt that Volvo lore handed down from those good old days sustained a lot of 144 and 164 owners when their trusty Swedish steeds refused to start three mornings out of seven.

If Volvo was the enthusiast’s darling in the late Fifties and early Sixties, it al­most became the official car of the loons and dimbulbs of academe and the con­sumer movement in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Now, with Volvo send­ing us cars like the landmark GT (for­merly called 242GT) and our test car, the very slick GL, the pendulum has swung back toward automotive righ­teousness again. In fact, there’s a lot to light the enthusiast’s fire in these latest offerings from the solid burghers of Goteborg. These are four-cylinder cars, powered by Volvo’s infinitely lovable B-21 F engine—2.1 liters, 107 horsepower at 5250 rpm, and 114 pounds-feet of torque—an oversquare, overhead-cam, fuel-injected four that just seems to beg for abuse. Horsepower has been raised from 101 in the last couple of years, and those extra six do seem to make them­selves felt as a useful addition. The B-21—introduced in 1975—differs from its four-cylinder antecedents in that it features a belt-driven overhead cam­shaft, but the noise and the verve are unchanged.

The engine’s polished manners are due in no small part to Volvo’s Lambda-­sond emissions system. Lambda-sond, as you may know, is the self-monitoring pollutant controller pioneered by Volvo in 1977 that incorporates a three-way catalyst, an oxygen sensor, electronic fuel injection, and an on-board comput­er. Because the system demands precise fuel distribution, a stoichiometric fuel­-air ratio, and an optimized timing curve, it not only does a better than average job of cleaning up exhaust nasties, but smooths over the rough spots in driva­bility as well.

I’ve been listening to four-cylinder Volvo engines since I drove a PV444 (the 1941 Ford look-alike) in the Pikes Peak Hill Climb in 1958, and this new one sounds just like that one—feisty. However, if feistiness is what you seek, you should opt for the GT. Introduced two years ago, the GT has done much to restore Volvo’s credibility among the good guys, selling like hotcakes and pleasing owners and dealers alike. The GL is another breed of Swede. The Vol­vo legend is firmly based on four-cylin­der engines, and as their six-cylinder cars became more and more pricey, and people began to worry more and more about fuel economy, Volvo product planners saw an opportunity: why not build a four-door sedan with all the lux­ury of the primo six-cylinder cars, but power it with the straightforward practicality and economy of the B-21F four-cylinder? So they did. The resulting car is a paragon of North European auto­motive virtue, a car that everybody in a decision-making capacity in Detroit should drive for a year. Tighter, lighter, better appointed, and cheaper than a Seville, the GL—equipped as ours was, with a four-speed manual transmission and electric overdrive—delivers 18 mpg in town and 28 on the highway, says the EPA. In our experience this estimate is actually very low. But better still, the Volvo is a genuinely amusing car to drive. It’s alert, responsive, and stable. The handling, braking, and roadholding that go with all this luxury are first-class, and though the ride is European, it would not offend a Pontiac owner.

This is a wonderful car for the long­-distance traveler. It’s long-legged, and economical enough for most people, and it’s always a pleasure to open the door and hop in. It’s loaded with useful space, both in the cabin and in the lug­gage compartment, and the seats are as good as anything this side of a Porsche 928. Ours were upholstered in some kind of petrochemical-derived cloth that clung to wool clothing like Velcro and made it impossible to slide across the seat for entry or exit. The accepted drill was to get in as far as possible before dropping into the seat, then hoist your­self up and repeat the process until you’d kedged your backside into the dead-center position. Once ensconced in those seats, however, your body will thank you for all the trouble you went to. The front seats are adjustable for height, rake, and fore-and-aft position­ing, and there’s a cam-type lumbar adjustment. The driver’s seat-height ad­justment (front and rear) is accom­plished with a pair of levers under the seat. The passenger’s seat offers the same range of adjustment, but is bolted in place, thus requiring the use of hand tools. Finally, the driver’s seat is electrically heated. The system is automatically, thermostatically controlled, and there’s something truly friendly about the warm feeling that begins to wrap the buttocks and kidneys when you first set out on a frigid morning. At the other end of the climate-control scale we’d like to applaud the Volvo sunroof, with its optional wind deflector. The translucent plastic deflector makes it possible to cruise at very high speeds with the roof open, even in the rain, and its ben­efits to smokers are great indeed.

Because of the seats, all of the control relationships are very nice in the Volvo. The driver’s seat being chair-height, and its adjustments being as compre­hensive as they are, one can make abso­lutely certain that all the controls are right within one’s grasp. Visibility is good, inside and out, and this too helps the drivability. The GL instrument pan­el is bulkhead-to-bulkhead information, and that’s the way we like them. The ta­chometer is centered before the driver, with warning lights for parking brake, high beams, bulb and brake-system failure, and a service reminder for the Lambda-sond system in the same square. To the left of the tach is the speedometer—reading only to Miss Claybrook’s 85 miles per hour, about 15 percent short of the car’s potential—­along with the odometer and trip mile­age in tenths. To the right are the wa­ter-temperature and fuel gauges, plus warning lights for oil pressure and gen­erator, and an indicator light for the electric overdrive. The center section of the dash features air outlets, a clock, a rheostat for the instrument lights, rocker switches for rear-window defog and four-way flashers, and a control panel for the heater/air conditioner. Below all this, our car had an AM/FM radio and cassette player. Smack in the middle is an ashtray, a little drawer masked by the black vinyl that covers the panel and console, and this is the only part that doesn’t seem very well designed. It was invariably smudged and ash-strewn and detracted from the otherwise tidy effi­ciency of the dash. Between the graphic layout of the instrument panel and its illumination, Volvo does as good a job of conveying facts about the condition and operation of the car as anybody in the business. All GLs are fitted with electric windows, and the buttons for these have been moved from the center of the dash to the armrest.

All the controls feel good—perhaps because all the components they’re at­tached to work so well. The steering is positive, with lots of feel. The four­-wheel disc brakes can be applied with micrometer accuracy in spite of a gener­ous power assist, and the clutch is smooth as silk. The owner’s manual does not recommend using the clutch for the shift (switch?) from fourth to fourth-overdrive, maintaining that it’s only necessary for the shift back down to fourth, but we used it both ways, up and down. Somehow the overdrive en­gagement is smoother when the clutch is used, feeling like the upshift in a very old automatic transmission when it isn’t. The switch for the electric over­drive unit is on the shift knob, and works on fourth gear only at speeds above 45. It’d be nice to have it avail­able on third gear as well, but our Swed­ish friends don’t see it that way. All four ratios in the gearbox are well chosen and nicely matched. The final-drive ra­tio is 3.91 on overdrive cars, dropping to 3.13 when overdrive is engaged. Vol­vos ordered with the optional Borg­Warner three-speed automatic trans­mission have a final-drive ratio of 3.73.

Something of profound importance has taken place at Volvo in the past three years. They’ve gotten their act to­gether, and the cars they build improve all the time. Several of us felt that this was the best Volvo we’d ever driven, lively and agile with truly impressive attention to quality in every detail. Volvo is no longer a builder of cars for fringe markets; the GL and its sporty relative, the GT, are very much cars for the times, and very nicely slotted against the highly profitable (and growing) market for cars costing from 10,000 to 15,000 dollars. They’ve begun to look a little long in the tooth, maybe a little too big now that everything else is get­ting smaller, but there can be no argu­ment about the way they work. With an improvement in fuel economy our test GL would have been perfect.

Counterpoints

Excuse me for stepping right off into deep minutiae here, but I am positively enraptured by Volvo clutches, not just this one but all that I’ve sampled in the last few years. In the whole car kingdom, no others work half so well.

The takeup in a Volvo clutch is so silky and so gradual. And the effort drops off in such a marvelously linear fashion as you let out the pedal. If you ever have to teach someone how to drive a stick shift. this is the car to do it in. They’ll find it easier than tangoing on Arthur Murray’s footprints.

What about the rest of the car? Well, it’s a Volvo, to the eye and to the trouser seat pretty much like last year’s version and the one of the year before that. A known commodity in an otherwise rather tumultuous car market. I like it well enough.

But I’m just flat smitten by the clutch. —Patrick Bedard

Another year, another Volvo. Same soap­cake styling. Roomy interior: check. Front seats that all cars ought to have. The same old Volvo, tried and true. So how come I like it so much? Glad you asked.

I guess it’s because this is the first Vol­vo I’ve driven in some time that isn’t trying to be something other than a family sedan. The 242GT didn’t quite make it as an ersatz BMW. And the chopped-top Swedish Toonderbird, the 262C, was so ugly that only a mother could love it—not to mention rough-edged in finish and in nature.

The GL, however, has no such lofty intentions. Yet under its non-descript—­make that homely—sheetmetal beats the heart of a pretty refined automobile. All those years of development must have meant something after all, because the GL impressed me with its long-distance prowess, back-road agility, performance, comfort, construction, and luxury. It may be just another Volvo, but it’s also an aw­fully nice car. —Rich Ceppos

There is nice work, and then there is nice work. This is nice work. And there is something else that’s nice: anybody with a reasonable bank account can get this work. Any Volvo dealer can set you up with a rewarding position. At the wheel of one of these gems.

The back seating is beginning to look a little less spacious than it did before the advent of multitudes of midsized front­-wheel-drive cars, but the odds are big that the Volvo is still much more comfortable. And in the front, the seating is the stuff of historic significance. Volvo has stirred in some Ameri-plush, run-your-fingers­-through-it upholstery, and such luscious covering has never been laid over better seats. I’m keeping my eye out for a wrecked Volvo so’s I can get a pair of them for my living room.

A living room is what Volvo has magi­cally wanded up here: most of the com­forts of home in a conveyance more com­fortable with its roads than most car buy­ers could believe. If Detroit could turn out just one car that approached this one’s overall excellence … what’s the use of speculating? —Larry Griffin

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com