P1800 EVOLUTION
Volvo pulled the covers off its new P1800 in 1960 at the Brussels Motor Show and this stylish new coupé went on sale the following year. Not long after the P1800’s launch, this good looking grand tourer was given a useful promotional boost when it beat the E-Type as the car of choice for Roger Moore’s character Simon Templar in the hit TV series The
Saint. The production company had originally approached Jaguar for an E-Type as Templar’s transport of choice but the Coventry-based company declined and a white Volvo P1800 with the registration number ST1 took the staring automotive role.
For many years Volvo claimed the P1800’s graceful profile was a product of the design team at the Italian-based Carrozeria Pietro Frua. However, in 2009 the Swedish based car maker came clean and admitted how Pelle Patterson, a Volvo design engineer working for Frua at the time, had been responsible for the car's styling. Early examples of Volvo’s grand tourer were built in the UK by West Bromwich-based Jensen Motors who had sub-contracted the production of the bodyshell to Pressed Steel in Linwood, Scotland.
Unfortunately, despite the P1800’s high price, build quality, or rather a dire lack of it, severely let the P1800 down and in 1963 Volvo cut short its contract with Jensen and transferred all the final assembly work back to its assembly plants in Torslanda and Gothenburg in Sweden. Examples built after this date were badged as the P1800S, the ‘S’ denoting Sweden, and in 1968 the model’s 1780cc B18 was replaced with the larger 1966cc B20 engine, a move that provided a useful power hike, up from 100 to 108bhp.
In 1968 the P1800 gained a dual-circuit braking system and the following year all the bodyshell production was transferred from Pressed Steel to Volvo in Sweden. The next major modification was the installation of Bosch electronic fuel injection on the 130bhp P1800E (the ‘E’ standing for
Einspritzung, a German term for fuel injection). All round discs were fitted to the P1800E from 1969 and in 1971 Volvo offered an optional three-speed Borg Warner automatic gearbox in place of the standard-fit four-speed manual and optional overdrive transmission.
The P1800E coupé bowed out in 1971 and was replaced by the short-lived P1800ES estate featuring a glass rear hatch and a folding rear seat that when lowered formed a long, flat loading area. However, with Ralph Nader banging the drum on the other side of the pond for the introduction of tough new safety regulations, Volvo found it was too expensive to re-engineered this highly practical grand tourer for the lucrative North American market. This decision led to the final Volvo P1800ES, a model nicknamed Fiskbilen, (Fishvan) in Sweden and Schneewittchensarg (Snow White’s Coffin) in Germany, rolling off Volvo's Swedish assembly lines in 1973.