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Boxy, Rusty Vintage Volvos Line the Streets of Ithaca
November 16, 2007 - 1:00amSince the mid-80s at the Ithaca Festival parade, a flock of vintage Volvos adorned in tutus — blasting Swan Lake and accompanied by frolicking men and women in tutus — rolls down a downtown Ithaca street.
“It’s pretty special,” said Tom Smith, the sales manager of Ithaca Foreign Car Service, of the Volvo Ballet. “It’s also pretty astounding for a town this size to have the number of Volvos it has.”
Someone told me that Volvos are popular in Ithaca because Volvos are hippie cars. Ithaca is a hippie town — so that’s that, right?
But what about Volvos make them hippie cars? Why are vintage Volvos — pre-1993, rear-wheel drive Volvos, notorious for poor handling in wet weather — so common in a very hilly town often blanketed in lake effect snow?
“Volvos are popular in Ithaca because of Foreign Car Service,” Smith said. Smith added that the Foreign Car Service works on about 95 percent of the Volvos in town.
The Foreign Car Service is a Volvo sales shop and service station independent of any Volvo dealer. As such, their labor rates are much cheaper than a dealer. The Ithaca Foreign Car Service — which Dave Allen, Dave Brumsted and Dan Ryan began began in 1974 — also prides itself on honesty and integrity, qualities often lacking in dealer mechanics.
“We won’t try to sell you anything you don’t need, and we won’t do anything on the car that doesn’t need to be done,” Smith said.
Self-described motorhead Dave Brumsted, a born-and-bred Ithacan who enrolled in Cornell in 1967 and then transferred to Ithaca College, went a bit more into the history of the Ithaca Foreign Car Service.
“While I was at IC, I worked for a car repair shop and eventually the shop’s former owner was forced out of business because he didn’t pay taxes,” Brumsted said. “At the time, we worked on all foreign cars, from Peugeots to Citroëns to Alfa Romeos, but gradually they were all weeded out in favor of Volvos, and after three years, Volvos were all we worked on.”
The Foreign Car Service has made its mark in the Volvo Ballet via the donation of vintage Volvos. At least one Foreign Car Service vintage Volvo has sashayed through the parade each year for the past two years. In 2006 the Foreign Car Service donated a 1993 240 wagon; in 2007, a 1991 740 wagon. After the parade, the donated Volvos were raffled off. Brumsted said a majority of the Volvos in the Ballet fleet have been worked on at the Foreign Car Service.
As for the hippie end of the Ithaca-Volvo equation, Brumsted paralleled the Volvo 240 wagons and sedans with the iconic VW buses.
“They’re of the same genre,” he said. “And the cars of the 60s, 70s and 80s are extremely durable cars — they can be passed through many hands.”
Brumsted recalled a shirt made by an Ithacan t-shirt company in the late 60s. The shirt featured a drawing of the bumper-sticker-plastered back of a Volvo 240 wagon with a woman on the roof sitting in the lotus position, i.e. cross-legged, with her hands on her knees, thumb and middle fingers touching.
“I still have the t-shirt,” Brumsted said. “It should be hanging in the office.”
Smith explained that the number of educated people in Ithaca have made Volvos popular in the city, in addition to the Foreign Car Service. He reasoned that educated people seek out a safe car, as did Brumsted. Volvo engineers invented the standard three-point safety belt.
Finding a decent pre-1993 vintage Volvo to purchase is no easy task, especially if it’s been in the Northeast for most of its life. If cared for poorly, many Volvos rust and become “structurally unsound,” Smith said.
Brumsted emphasized the corrosive effect salt has on cars, Volvos included. But he noted that Volvos, with their super-warm heating system, make a great “winter rat” car, or car a driver uses in the winter in lieu of a nicer, more-in-shape car when the roads are coated in salt. In the worst of horrible Ithaca weather, Smith said, Volvos need only a good set of snow tires to put-put up hills and get around town.
The Ithaca Foreign Car Service sales shop didn’t have any vintage Volvos in stock at the time of the interview, but Smith noted that the sales shop is getting a 1993 Volvo 240 Sedan from North Carolina, a location that’s a plus in terms of estimating how much longer the already 14-year-old car will last. Given North Carolina’s drier, warmer climate, Smith said that the 240 could last another 20 years.
Stickers that advertise Volvo longevity — i.e. the Volvo High Mileage Club badges — often appear on the trunk of Volvos. The stickers begin at 100,000 and increase by the hundred thousand. Irv Gordon of Long Island owns a 1966 Volvo P1800, which, as of February 2002, had two million miles, according to theautochannel.com.
“Volvos won’t stop running,” Smith said. “They essentially have tractor motors.”
Smith’s own 1996 Volvo 850 has nearly 250,000 miles on it.
Smith, too, conceded that Volvos were once considered hippie cars. Now, however, he believes they’re considered yuppie cars — a new fully-loaded Volvo S80 tallies in at around $50,000, a steep price tag for the stereotypical hippie.
Even if now many consider a Volvo to be a yuppie car, Smith believes that they’ll last longer than their boxy predecessors, mainly because they’re “extremely rust-resistant.”
Contact jdinapoli@cornellsun.com if you would like to suggest a car I should test drive or would like to have your car — be it a rusty old Geo Metro or a fly Ferrari F50 — featured in Alfa Tomato.