Every now and again, a used vehicle arrives in the cheap car marketplace that really garners attention. It stands out due to its history or specification and, for a brief moment, makes you wonder if the market's lost its mind.The first-generation Volvo C70 T5 is just such an example. As a genuinely distinctive four-seat grand tourer from the late 1990s, it was a product of Volvo's design reset and has the capable fingers of Tom Walkinshaw Racing (TWR) all over it. It's got one of the company's most charismatic engines within, but is now on sale for only four figures, with entry points less than a grand.It's undoubtedly one of the most elegant two-door vehicles to wear a Volvo badge and, with input from luminaries like Peter Horbury, you really wonder why the C70 T5 is such a sharp value play. It's almost as if the market doesn't fully understand exactly what it is. The C70 Is The Volvo Nobody Expected Cars and BidsVolvo once had a reputation for building solid but forgettable vehicles with an upright or sometimes awkward design, plenty of practicality, and undoubted durability. But when the company unveiled the C70 at the 1996 Paris Motor Show, everything had changed. Now you had a vehicle with long doors, a low roofline, a graceful glasshouse, and some visual tension suggesting that Volvo was trying to be hip and shake off its older shackles.Apparently, the company took only 30 months to come up with its C70 idea, which does seem like a very short window of time for something that would change the brand's visual direction so much.When you dig deeper into the C70’s backstory, it becomes even more interesting. Volvo worked with TWR through a joint venture and brought in Ian Callum to create a design that would push the project a long way away from the more traditional Volvo look. This resulted in a car that people were more likely to want rather than simply need.Today, the colorful background gives the C70 something many cheap old luxury coupes simply don't have. It's got a convincing story of origin that showed Volvo could design around beauty, speed, comfort, and image without losing sight of its core engineering integrity. The T5 Really Is A Stunning Bargain Now Cars and Bids It's hard to believe you can pick up one of these Volvo C70s for around $1,000 or so, with averages in the mid-nines. Even allowing for the fact that the cheapest will be rough bargain-basement cars, suited for deferred maintenance projects, that's an incredibly low place to start for what was once a handsome, turbocharged, and premium-badged grand tourer. When you consider that the 1998 C70 coupe was never some cut-rate special, it makes the current market price even more incredible in context.These Volvos were also quite rare. The company only produced 76,809 cars in its first-generation production batch, with 27,014 of those being coupes and the rest convertibles. This makes the coupe, in particular, a very low-volume car by mainstream premium standards, and that really hasn't translated into collector prices at all.The market may eventually start to look at this C70 through rose-colored glasses and those prices may start to go north again. But until then, the C70 T5 lives in a space where someone can buy one to really enjoy its design, soundtrack, and long-legged GT character without paying any classic car premiums at all. The Five-Cylinder Engine Is A Reason It Punches Above Its Price Cars and Bids One of the biggest draws of the C70 T5 is undoubtedly its engine. It's a turbocharged 2.3-liter inline-five producing 236 hp and 243 lb-ft of torque, and it sends that power to the front wheels via either a five-speed manual or a four-speed automatic.This engine also came with plenty of character, with torque that arrived low enough to give it the kind of easy, purposeful shove that suits a fast road car. And that meant that the T5 was never equipped with a peaky, high-strung engine that only seemed to wake up at the top of the rev range.Instead, it could transfer its output to the road successfully enough to reach 62 mph in only 6.9 seconds with the manual box. It could also get to a top speed of 155 mph in that specification, which is very strong for a front-drive four-seat coupe of that time.Purists will know that Volvo's five-cylinder engines also have a marvelous soundtrack. They don't sound like a four-cylinder or a six-cylinder at all and have a really unconventional rhythm, with a textured growl when you load them up and a slightly off-beat sound. Those motors also give the C70 a layer of mechanical personality that other more expensive German contemporaries can only envy.Engine aside, Volvo also created a solid package with sterling chassis development assistance from TWR. You could also get a large-diameter wheel and tire package with sport-oriented suspension and traction systems, and all that was far more than people usually expected in a Volvo. The Coupe Was More Than A Cheap Convertible Alternative Cars and Bids Perhaps the C70 is undervalued because it doesn't fit into a neat categorization box. It's not as overtly luxurious as a Mercedes CLK, and it definitely doesn't have the aggressive, sporty reputation of a BMW coupe. It's not obviously collectible like a Japanese halo car from the same era and that brings a load of ambiguity into the picture.The C70 isn't an established legend, but it seems to have strengths that are more subtle in nature. After all, you'll get a premium cabin with usable rear seats and can enjoy a comfortable ride, with genuine high-speed composure. You might also appreciate the C70's cultural history, with Volvo positioning the C70 as an emotional, glamorous, image-shifting car before its actual launch. One of these models appeared in the hit movie The Saint with Val Kilmer, to help give the car a head start before it hit the showrooms.Starring roles aside, the C70 was every bit as much of a grand tourer inside as it might have been out. It had a strong audio system, dual-zone climate control, and powered seats, and buyers loved it for its configuration, solid build quality, and daily usability. Crucially, all those features and benefits carry forward to the current day, making the C70 a car that people can easily live with right now.Although many people might go for a convertible simply because there are more of them around, the coupe deserves a lot of attention by itself. It's cleaner in profile and perhaps a bit more cohesive as a design, and it doesn't have any of those extra worries that you might get with an aging soft-top mechanism. It could yet be the sharper answer for anybody looking for a forgotten turbocharged five-cylinder grand tourer that's also impossibly cheap. Not Every Cheap C70 Is A Smart Buy Cars and Bids A thousand dollars or so might sound appealing to some when searching for a C70, but such a purchase could carry a lot of risk. You'd have to be on the lookout for timing belt and water pump issues, and suspension wear. And if you want to cover a convertible, take a very good look at the roof system, seals, and associated electronics. All told, it's probably better to look for a C70 T5 higher up the budget ladder and if you can find a tidy, documented example, you could be making a very shrewd purchase indeed.However, don't hang around for too long, as the C70 T5 may yet move from the status of an interesting old used car to that of a recognized modern classic. And when that happens, the best examples will be the first to jump.In summary, the Volvo C70 T5 seems to be at an unusually appealing moment. It’s quite rare, fast enough to feel worthwhile, and cheap enough to keep the risk level on the relatively low side. And surely the market has not yet priced in the car's design story, five-cylinder appeal, or historical connotations. So, for those who are knowledgeable and ready to buy, this market mismatch is certainly worth exploiting.
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