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One Man's Journey is another's Volvo

Here is a portion of an email exchange I had with a good friend. I consider him very funny as he is exacting in his humor. The thread is about what car to buy for his new gig in Oakland, CA. I of course wanted him to go for speed and the high probability of getting a cap busted in his a**, he of course has the perfect solution (edited to protect the innocent).

No doubt the STi rocks, but that would get me back into the R32 realm which (sadly) I needed to leave when I shuffled off to Noir City.

No, I've decided to confuse friends, enemies, family, strangers, and even Sadie by going old school. Or - as some might think - Total Retard. Read on...

My friend X who, together with you, I consulted about my car choices made a good point: avoid the awkward years of car electronics. Depending on brand, that meant anything from about 1972 to the early/mid 1990s. Hard to work on, prone to failure, hard to find parts for.

Factor in my budget, my sort of rekindled Bohemian sensibilities, and my skill set, and it boiled down to one of these for a cool, funky, bulletproof commuter:
Something pre-Nixon (second term)
A used WRX
A new Fit
Then last week, while innocently browsing eBay, I appear to have blacked out. When I woke up I found that I was the high bidder on this 1966 Volvo 122s sedan:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250610342293&viewitem=&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWAX%3AIT

Originally from Berkeley, it appears to have been a one (pipe smoking) owner car that was donated to a charity last year. All records were purged when it was donated; I bought it from a dealer in Concord who mostly deals in retired cop cars but decided to pick this one up on a whim.

Like the VW Beetle in Sleeper - the one that was found in a cave after 200 years and started on the first try - this Volvo started without hesitation. The turn signals work. The gas gauge works. The brakes work. It rolls. It turns. It stops. It has factory 3-point seat belts, radial tires, at at one point in its life was able to hit 60 in less than 15 seconds. I drove it home from Concord on the freeway and actually passed two slower vehicles. It even fits in the garage together with Bluie. Bluey. Whatever.

Now it awaits a new interior, tires, some new suspension pieces, and a lot of work before it will look something like this:

http://www.conceptcarz.com/vehicle/z11028/volvo-122s.aspx

Just to put things in perspective, when this car was new:

The Beatles were still a year away from releasing Sergeant Pepper
Humans were three years away from landing on the moon
Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were still alive
I had hair
And this car still basically works!

Can a car from that era function as a modern day Bay Area commuter? That's the question I hope to answer with this experiment. I call it...

The Dark Side of the Alan Parsons Project (or, in Oakland vernacular, D-SAPP)

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