C70 Convertible: Once A Radical Idea, Now Overdue For Retirement
Written: May 22 '04 (Updated May 15 '05)
Product Rating:
Pros: Safety features, comfortable front seats, non-conformist Volvo image.
Cons: Quivery structure, poor rear visibility, driving experience and interior not up to the price.
The Bottom Line: Now that all Volvos are stylish, this sleek but aging convertible no longer carries any novelty value. What's left is a mediocre car in a fiercely competitive segment.
I test-drove a Volvo C70 LPT Convertible at a local dealership. My test drive lasted about half an hour and covered city streets, the freeway, and an empty parking lot that served as an impromptu autocross course. My girlfriend also owned a C70 briefly, which I regularly drove in all manner of conditions, from around-town errands to weekend road trips down the coast.
Performance
My test car was equipped with the "low pressure turbo" 2.4-liter five-cylinder, and while this engine provided respectable acceleration, I found it neither strong nor refined enough for a high-priced luxury convertible.
Five-cylinder engines--an usual design--are inherently not as smooth in operation as the six-cylinders in most of the C70's rivals, and this becomes immediately apparent from the driver's seat. The engine sends tingly vibrations up through the seats and steering wheel, and while the engine note is well-muffled, the underhood noises you do hear are coarse and gravelly ones.
I remember reading a magazine article a couple years ago that likened the phlegmy sound of the Volvo five-cylinder to "a BMW with bronchitis," and I think that's a perfect description. In the C70, this coarse engine note makes makes the car sound unrefined in normal driving, and strained under hard acceleration--disappointing sensations in such an expensive vehicle.
In terms of actual performance, the C70's engine fares better. Although 197hp doesn't sound like much for a relatively heavy luxury machine, the C70 steps off the line with authority, and pulls fairly well until running out of puff around 5000rpms. But it's not without flaws in this department, either. Like most turbocharged cars, the C70 is prone to turbo lag--a delay between the time your foot goes down and the time the car starts to accelerate in earnest.
This unsatisfying sensation of lag is worsened by the automatic transmission, which is slow to downshift when you prod the gas pedal. The combined effect is that, when you nail the throttle for a quick burst of speed, the transmission hesitates for a second before downshifting, and then the engine lags for a moment before picking up revs--and by that time, your opportunity to cut into the fast lane has passed.
Transmission/Clutch
As I'm sure you've gathered by now, I wasn't thrilled with the C70's automatic transmission--and in the LPT version, a slushbox is the only option. This unit seemed inordinately stubborn and unresponsive in hard driving, dawdling when I asked for downshifts and upshifting earlier than I wanted.
But then again, I'm used to manual transmissions, and am pretty intolerant of automatics in general--especially when they don't anticipate my every whim.
So if you prefer automatics to begin with, will you like the C70's transmission better than I did? Maybe--but you'll still find things to complain about. For example, the shifter itself has a stiff but springy action, so when you try to shift from Park to Drive, you often end up bouncing into Third or Low. Likewise, if you go for Reverse, you'll probably end up in Park again. You get used to it with a little practice, but let's be realistic--you don't spend $40,000 on a new car to deal with interfaces that "take getting used to."
Steering/Handling
Again, a disappointment. I didn't expect the C70 to handle like a sports car--it makes its luxury mission quite clear--but I was expecting it to handle with a measure of agility and confidence appropriate to its price. Insead, I found that the C70 feels heavy and sluggish in the corners, and just average in everyday driving.
The C70's steering is typical of Volvos from a few years ago--heavy, rubbery, and devoid of road feel. While I usually like high-effort steering, the Volvo's has an unnatural, elastic quality to its weighting that makes it heavy when you turn the wheel off-center, but springy as it winds back to the middle. As a result, constant-radius corners require a tedious series of corrections to hold your intended line, none of which put the car exactly where you want it.
Chassis dynamics are a little better, but still way behind the curve--so to speak. Charge into a corner at brisk speeds, and the C70 feels like it's carrying a lot of weight on its nose as it leans over and plows on the front tires. Tire grip is pretty good, but that doesn't keep the C70 from feeling slow and ponderous when the going gets twisty--and the lack of communication through the wheel means you never have a really good sense of when that grip is about to run out.
So the C70 is no canyon-road runner. That at least means it's a great long-distance GT car then, right? Well, er... no. The C70's flaccid body structure and dull steering make for very average straight-line tracking, and require you to herd the car back to the center of the lane when it wanders off--which it does rather often on imperfect road surfaces.
But to be fair, empty-nest buyers coming from minivans or decade-old family cars will probably find little to complain about on the subject of the C70's road manners. And if you're not particularly picky about handling or steering response, you probably won't be as disappointed as I was. I just think it's a little silly for a $40,000 car to handle less nimbly than a good-quality midsize sedan, which is exactly the case here.
Ride
After all this handling criticism, you might expect the C70 to pay it back with a comfortable ride. Sadly, that's not the case--the C70 is also way behind luxury-car standards when it comes to ride comfort.
The main issue here is structural rigidity--simply put, the C70 doesn't have enough of it. The structure quivers and shudders over bumps, potholes, expansion joints, you name it--if a surface isn't glass-smooth, it's going to set up rubbery jiggles in the C70's frame, with accompanying drumming sounds from the body.
Worsening matters is the fact that the C70's suspension feels surprisingly firm and thumpy on rough roads, considering its lack of handling prowess. It's not all bad news, of course--the ride is very quiet and Cadillac-plush when the asphalt is fresh and uncratered. But when the pavement quality drops, so will your comfort level, by a significant margin.
Interior
The C70's interior is probably its strongest asset, although it's still not up there with the best in class. I'll start with the good news, since you've probably had enough negativity by this point. The C70's front seats are excellent--big, broad, and plush-feeling but plenty supportive on long trips. The wide range of power adjustments makes it easy to find a perfect driving position, and the standard seat heaters--which sound frivolous at first--suddenly make a lot of sense on chilly mornings. Indeed, those front seats might have been my favorite thing about this car. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, you would be partially correct, but you'd also be underestimating just how cushy they are.
In other respects, the C70's interior is less impressive. For example, the styling of the dashboard looks pretty dated--it's remained unchanged since the car's 1998 introduction, and even then was an exact copy of the one in the staid S70 sedan and V70 wagon. The control layout is no more confusing than that of most European cars, but it's still not as clean and logical as that of a Japanese vehicle. Materials quality is pretty good, but I don't know if it's $40,000 good--there's still some hard plastic on the dash, and the controls don't move with the silky precision of those in a Lexus or Acura. The wood trim feels thin and plasticky, too.
More importantly, I found the C70 lacking in some practical aspects of interior design (in a Volvo? Heresy!) The rear window is laughably small, reducing rear visibility to a bare minimum. Need to parallel park? Might want to drop that top first. The rear seats are cramped, too, so the C70 shouldn't be thought of as a four-seater unless it's an emergency. A lot of this comes with the territory when you're shopping for a convertible, but I was hoping the Volvo would gain in comfort and practicality what it lost in driving dynamics. No such luck.
Practicality
I suppose the last section answered this one to some degree, but what I haven't mentioned yet is the C70's miniscule cargo capacity. The trunk looks ample from the outside, but open it up, and you'll find that a large shelf blocks the top half of the C70's trunk from use. I guess that's where the top goes when it's folded down. So if you want to fit something in the trunk, it's going to have to be pretty flat and compact, or it won't fit through the narrow opening. Bulky loads are out of the question, especially since the rear seats don't fold down to expand the cargo area--there's a pass-through in the center armrest, but that's good for ski poles and little else. This is all quite frustrating in a Volvo, where you expect practicality to be a strong point.
Reliability
Consumer Reports has no reliability data on the C70 as of now, but their ratings for other Volvo models range from Average for the S60 and V70 to Much Worse Than Average for the XC90. It's impossible to say for sure whether the C70's reliability is at the good or bad end of this spectrum, but judging by my girlfriend's experience with her C70, I'd expect it to fall toward the latter. Her car's electrical systems were a seemingly endless source of headaches, and the high costs of parts and maintenance didn't help matters. In the six months that she owned the car, the power windows, seats, and top-folding mechanism all went on strike and required repair--despite her careful attention to routine maintenance. That car may have been a lemon, but the experience still bears consideration. Owner reviews of older C70s will likely shed more light on the subject.
Overall
When Volvo introduced the C70 convertible six years ago, it was a shock to the automotive community. It was the first time the Swedish automaker had abandoned its blocky design philosophy and taken a stylistic risk--and with the C70's smooth, sweeping curves, response to this bold move was overwhelmingly positive. "This? A Volvo?" was the popular reaction in car magazines. Of course, what very few people mentioned was the fact that the C70 was essentially a rebodied S70 sedan, which itself dated back to the 850, introduced for the 1993 model year. Those are some old roots, and although the C70's sleek styling was enough to compensate for its dated chassis in 1998, that's no longer the case today.
Volvo has undergone a stylistic revolution in the last few years, and now, everything the manufacturer sells is sleek and modern-looking. As a result, the C70 has lost its novelty value, since "stylish Volvo" is no longer a contradiction in terms. In fact, the C70 is now among the more conservative-looking models in the Volvo lineup, overshadowed by all but the full-size S80 sedan.
Now that looks alone are not enough reason to buy the C70, it has to rely on its performance, handling, ride, and interior quality--all of which, we've established, are starting to betray its circa-1993 underpinnings. As much as I love Volvos--and I really do--I just don't see a good reason to spend forty grand on an eleven-year-old design. The BMW 3-Series convertible, Audi A4 convertible, and Mercedes-Benz CLK cabrio all offer far more sophistication and dynamic capability, and cost about the same, give or take a few thousand. The primary draw of the C70, at this point, is its quirky, nonconformist Volvo image--and if that's what you're after, it's available in far superior cars, at lower prices, right on the Volvo dealership lot.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
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