When Ken Taylor sank into the XC60 luxury compact SUV that picked him up during this year’s Victoria Film Festival, he remarked it was the first time he’d been in a Volvo since 1980.
Cruising in one of two Volvos — the other was a white S60 luxury sedan— provided by festival sponsor Jim Pattison Volvo of Victoria stirred memories of Taylor’s “Volvo saga,” he said. It took place in the 1970s, when Taylor was stationed in Tehran as Canada’s ambassador to Iran, driving around when he could in his “nifty” British racing green, fuel-injected 1800e Volvo sports car.
“That car got me into trouble and out of a lot of trouble,” Taylor recalled with a laugh. “It became a living symbol of liberation during the revolution.”
The eye-catching coupe — similar to the Volvo Roger Moore drove in The Saint — was delivered to Taylor in London in 1971, his last year as a diplomat at the Canadian High Commission.
“I just liked the look of it,” said Taylor. “I couldn’t have cared less about the specifications.”
His Volvo survived six winters in Ottawa.
Canadian filmmaker Drew Taylor, who directed Our Man in Tehran, the documentary that brought them here, said it’s easy to see why the film’s title character would be seduced by such a vehicle.
“Ken wasn’t your average ambassador,” he recalled. “He was this adventurous, 40-year-old guy heading to Tehran.”
While Taylor has been driven around in several luxury automobiles — including a Chevy Impala in Tehran, a Ford Crown Victoria when he was Canada’s Consul-General to New York and a Lincoln Town Car while senior vice-president of Nabisco — the gentlemanly retired diplomat says there was something about that Volvo he couldn’t resist, even when it could have put him in harm’s way.
All went well in Tehran until the revolution, recalled Taylor, whose wife Pat warned him not to take it out during the street fighting.
“I more or less followed instructions, but from time to time I’d drive through small barricades to buy the newspaper at the Hilton hotel,” said Taylor, who gently kicked its tires before his sudden departure from Iran.
“When I left I thought I’d seen the last of it,” he said, recalling an Iranian embassy staffer drove it “at great risk” out of Tehran to Turkey, where police viewed it as a security problem.
“That had to be the most x-rayed Volvo off the assembly line,” he laughed. “Somehow a broker sent it to Switzerland, where there were security concerns, and then there was the RCMP in Montreal.”
The car arrived back in Ottawa about 1981, where it has been in storage since.
“I’ve promised to liberate it very soon,” said Taylor, whose Volvo love is not uncommon.
Bob Rowlands, a Times Colonist copy editor, still drives his 1987 Volvo 740 because of what he calls a simple formula — 30 days, nine states, 9,700 kilometres and only $7.66 in unplanned repairs.
He was recalling a month-long road trip he impulsively took from Victoria through the southwestern U.S.
It took him onto the MV Coho to Port Angeles, then Seattle and east on Interstate 90 before reaching Douglas, Ariz., a small town on the Mexican border. En route he passed Arches and Canyonlands national parks in Utah, Mesa Verde in Colorado and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Highlights on the way home included an NBA game in Phoenix, and stops in the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Death Valley and Sacramento, reached after an unexpected detour above a snowy mountain pass.
“A trip like that can be risky business at any time of year but the car performed splendidly,” said Rowlands. “Volvos are well-built, and they’ll outlast just about anything on the road.”
Local Volvo owners also have the advantage of good service and parts supply, he said, noting there’s a wrecking yard in Cobble Hill claiming to be the largest of its kind in western Canada.
As for that $7.66 in unplanned repairs, it was for a headlight that burned out in northeastern Arizona.
Another impressed passenger was filmmaker Don McKellar, said festival director Kathy Kay, recalling he told her “you’ve really stepped up your game” when a 2014 Volvo pulled up.
George Armstrong, general sales manager of the Pattison dealership, says the same thing about the Swedish automaker that has been reborn since Asia’s Geely Company acquired it from Ford, investing $11.5 billion in R&D.
“Volvo has always been known for its safety record, and that along with the technological and design changes that were implemented — because now they have the money to do so — has resulted in amazing new product,” he said. “We’re not just your grandfather’s Volvo anymore.”
Indeed, any thoughts of those boxy Volvos of yesteryear vanished when we slipped into a sporty, stylish white S60 turbocharged luxury sedan with comfortable whiplash-prevention seating and a driver’s aid and an impressive safety technology package.
It’s also easy to see why festival guests gave the handsome and compact XC60 sports utility vehicle reviews as glowing as some of the festival hits, loaded as this high-performance looker is with award-winning safety features, spacious cabin and rear-cargo areas, comfy seats and gizmos drivers of modern luxury vehicles have come to expect.
Armstrong, whose 40 years in the automotive business includes 25 years with Ford and a decade with Porsche and Audi, is particularly pumped about the sleek new 2015 V60 sportswagon that shows how far Volvo has come.
“I’m so pleased to be at the helm of a place on the way up instead of down,” he said. “Volvo’s gone through some hard times but our product is unbelievable now. There’s a horse for every rider.”