JaredR’s Dad’s 1997 Frost Green V70 T5 | SwedeSpeed

So my dad just bought this. It’s just west of New Orleans, so I’ll probably take the train down there either over 4th of July break or between finals and commencement in August to drive it home. Initially, this car made no sense to me being that I’ve never seen a V70 T5 SE in the American market before, but then the carfax showed up. It appears to have a similar background as my T-5R: this one was built October 28, 1996, arrived in Newark January 28, 1997, and wasn’t shipped to the dealer until September 4, 1997. Supposedly it only did 3,000 miles before being registered in Oregon, so my best guess is that it spent quite a bit of time on display in Rockleigh showing off how cool the V70 was going to be in ’98, given the way Volvo spec’d it out. Note that it has heated seats but no headlight wipers, just like my T-5R, which seems to be a signature feature of a press car. After spending 10 years in Wilsonville, Oregon, it moved up to Vancouver, Washington for the next 7, and then to New Orleans in 2015.

Obviously the bumpers need a respray. Luckily we’ve figured out how to deal with that. We’ll definitely be adding a wing while we’re at it.

I don’t know if we’ll be able to save this tailgate if we want to make this thing look 100%. These are the worst dents on the car from what the seller says.

Karelian birch trim! My dad and I love this stuff, and this is only the 5th car I’ve seen in North America to have it. I’m going to start shopping for a nice chunk of this wood to carve a shift knob out of for the manual swap.

R door panels FTW.

Plan is for my dad to drive it as an automatic for long enough to see how he likes m4.4, then decide if we’re going to leave it m4.4 or convert to ME7 with the manual swap, and then M56 swap it…..haven’t decided for sure which one yet but I’m thinking a M56LK would be nice if we can get one. Not sure what other mods he’s going to want to do…..probably not quite as much as I would if I’d bought it (and I was actually thinking about selling my 850R to buy this for the 2 hours or so until I realized he really was serious about buying it) but I guess we’ll see. We are both really happy with how my T-5R rides and handles now so we will probably get as close to that as we can without going to the expense of adding Nivomats (yellow marked springs up front, some sort of S70 springs in the back???). Might throw an IPD rear sway in it too. I’m sure this thing is prewired for a 6 disc changer so I’m 100% sure he’ll put one of those in here, and he’ll probably add a center speaker, too.

Not sure what we are doing for wheels yet. The Perfos have new Continental ControlContact Touring A/S on them :facepalm:……..given my experience with the ControlContact Sport A/S on my R and the fact that this thing supposedly had a new turbo put in a year or two ago so, I’m expecting it to be able to light up the tires well into 3rd lol…….so that’s probably not going to be acceptable long term. Might throw a set of zLine AS on the second set of Volans and let this car borrow that for a while. Or maybe zLine AS in 16 on the Perfos. We’ll see.

Unfortunately, this acquisition most likely marks the end of the ’99 NAm project. I’d like to keep it around until I know if I’m going to end up with a job that I’ll have to drive to (in which case I’d use it as my winter car…we obviously can’t justify driving this car or either of my 850s when there is actually snow on the road due to all the morons around here with AWD and all seasons), but I don’t know if we will keep it around long enough to find out; probably depends on how soon we get this car up here.