Volvo P1800

If you ever wondered why the quintessential Brit hero, The Saint, drove a Volvo, there is a particular reason. The  P1800 Volvo he drove, was, at least at first, a British car. It was assembled by Jensen,  the renowned English sports car maker,  after Karmann Ghia lost out on the bidding to build the car. And in one of the most productive marketing moves in the car industry, Volvo decided to capitalize on the British connection by supplying vehicles for the British TV show, “The Saint,” which starred Roger Moore as the slightly shady,  free-lance,  womanizing, good guy.

Oh, Roger Moore loved the car!

Over the course of its run in the mid-1960s, Volvo provided the “The Saint” television producers a total of five P1800s. The first one was delivered in 1962, and with the dapper Moore, who would later play the role of  James Bond in feature films, at the wheel, the car became the envy of many a teenaged boy. Even when Volvo transferred  production of the model to Sweden for the 1964 model year, the P1800 remained the Saint’s car–white, of course–and it has remained so, in re-runs until this day. Moore became so enamored of the Volvo P1800 that he drove one in his personal life, including on the set.

Founded by Gustaf Larsson and Assar Gabrielsson, Volvo seemed an unlikely candidate to produce a sports coupe like the P1800 and an even less likely candidate to become the car of teenaged boys’ dreams. In fact,  its beginnings were fundamentally prosaic, with an emphasis on the toughness needed to survive the fierce Scandinavian climate the key feature of the company’s cars.

Though it seems strange to say, in the 1920s Chevrolet and Ford were dominant auto brands in Sweden.  Well-engineered, robust American cars were better suited to the rigors of everyday Swedish life than were the smaller cars of the Continent. Chevrolet even had a factory in Stockholm to assemble its vehicles, but Gabrielsson and Larsson, a salesman and engineer, respectively, decided that the Swedish car market was growing large enough to support a home-grown vehicle marque.

Apparently, a company is born

The concept  took some time to gestate. It was in the summer of 1924 that Gabrielsson and Larsson began seriously to discuss their strategies  for producing cars. That August,  they came to a verbal agreement about what form the company and the cars should take, and Larsson immediately launched into design work, even though he kept his “day job.”

It took almost two years before the design was finished, but Gabrielsson was having trouble raising money for the project, so the two partners decided they would build a prototype vehicle to show prospective financiers. Most  would have stopped at one prototype, but they decided to build 10, nine open “touring” cars and one “closed car,” a sedan.

Nine months after, the partners’ first test vehicles were completed, allowing Gabrielsson to gain the financial support of SKF, the company that had hired him. SKF guaranteed an initial series of 1,000 vehicles, provided the factory and gave the new company  its name, AB Volvo, which had been used in a previous business operation. Volvo is Latin which  means “I roll.”

First car not famous

The first car to emerge from the newly christened Volvo factory was officially  called  V4 but also nicknamed ”Jakob.” It was based on an American design and had a robust chassis and solid axles with long leaf springs at the front and rear. Its  4-cylinder engine developed 28 horsepower at 2000 rpm, and it had a claimed maximum speed of 55 miles per hour, but Volvo, thinking of safety from the git-go, recommended a cruising speed of 37 mph.

The original scheme  had called for the production of 500 touring cars and 500 sedans, but–go figure–Swedish customers were more taken with a closed car than a car that exposed them to the elements. Sales the first year (1927) totaled only 297 cars, so some quick revisions were made to the current business plan. Volvo started  building trucks and other commercial vehicles,  basically taxicabs, and that business sustained the company through the early years and on into the Depression era.

While the Jakob used a 4-cylinder engine, Volvo executives were enthusiastic about 6-cylinder power, so the next vehicle they introduced was the 6-cylinder PV651, which was more than an alpha-numeric bit of gibberish. In this case PV stood for PersonVagn (pre-dating Volkswagen by several years), 651 for 6-cylinder, five seats and first series. The beefier motor  achieved a good reception, particularly in the taxi market, helping Volvo weather the Depression.

American influences

Volvo had always been influenced by American design, and that aspect of its character came to the forefront in 1935 with the launch  of the PV36, “the streamlined car,” which was an obvious reaction to the Chrysler Airflow. The car had a split windshield, an integrated trunk,  fairings over the rear wheels, and a roomy passenger compartment. In fact, the car was a 6-seater, seating  three on its front bench and three in the rear. How American can you be! The PV36 bore the unusual nickname the Carioca, after a famous  South American dance that was in fashion in the mid-Thirties. Like the Chrysler Airflow, it was leading edge and like the Chrysler Airflow it didn’t sell very nicely.

With World War II causing havoc in Sweden, though the nation was officially neutral, in the autumn of 1944,  the company sent its cars through some significant downsizing. The PV444 was Volvo’s first true  tiny car, looking like a three-quarter-scale American sedan. The PV444 and its successor, the PV544, went on to dominate Volvo assembly through to the mid-Sixties and gave Volvo a strong toehold in the American market.

Though the Euro small car formula clicked for Volvo, it didn’t turn its back on America, and even as cars like the Kaiser Darrin,  Chevrolet Corvette,  and Nash-Healey were being produced, Volvo decided it wanted to offer a sports car as well. The 2-seater was called the Volvo Sport, and prototypes were created  of fiberglass and featured puncture-proof tires. Since there wasn’t much of a sports car market within Sweden,  the car was designed primarily for export, but it turned out there wasn’t much of an export market for the car either. Only 67 cars were assembled, and production ceased within one year.

With the quick  demise of the Volvo Sport,  it is surprising that the company had the desire to launch into another sports car program, but that’s exactly what it did in 1957. This time the company employed  the Italian design firm Frua, which was a Karmann affiliate, to draw the car’s lines. There is some controversy over exactly who penned the Frua drawings that became the P1800, but the design is generally attributed to  a Swedish designer,  Pelle Petterson, who had gone to work for the Italian company. Some say that Volvo never acknowledged Petterson as the designer simply because it wanted to invest the car with Italian prestige.

Beautiful P1800 a success

In any case,  the P1800 sports car was shown to the market  for the first time at the 1960 Brussels Motor Show. Powered by a new engine (B18), the handsome coupe was really a GT car rather than a sports car, but in any case, it was a success. Fitted with dual carburetors and backed with the sturdy M40 gearbox, the engine delivered 100 horsepower, enough for reasonable driving performance circa 1960.

In 1962,  the P1800 was a perfectly appropriate car to be driven by The Saint, Simon Templar,  and though Jensen had quality problems in building the car (there’s a shock) and production was transferred to Gothenburg in 1963, The Saint kept driving it. In 1963, the car also got a boost of  8 horsepower, enough to win it the designation P1800S. In 1966,  the engine was additionally revised to provide 115 horsepower. Three years later,  the then-venerable B18 engine was substituted by the 120-horsepower B20, and in 1970 a fuel-injected version was called the 1800E.

Arguably,  the coolest edition of the car was the station wagon-inspired Kamm-back coupe, complete with an all-glass tailgate. It was revealed  in 1971 as the 1800ES.  Both 1800E and 1800ES were created  in 1972, complete with a 124-horsepower version of the B20 engine. This last was said to reach the heady maximum speed of 115 mph.

Okay, so the P1800 wasn’t that  fast. And it wasn’t the greatest handling car of its day either. And it didn’t have an especially robust racing pedigree. There was one glaring  thing it was: it was cool. Just ask  The Saint, Simon Templar.

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