Seems like a lot of our “Eleanors” have dated from our awkward high school eras, and my “Eleanor” is no different. I grew up in a solidly Japanese car household, where four cylinders were more than enough and velour interiors were a gaudy and ostentatious display of excess. Vinyl burns on your legs were a sign it was summer, and having to turn off the A/C going up a long hill was the norm. However, when I unintentionally gave our ’84 Toyota Truck (model names were too bourgeois for Toyota, or for us!) a sheetmetal nosejob courtesy of a VW Fox just after getting my license, my father fixated on the idea of safety. And safety meant Volvo. Of course, the pitiful amount of cash I’d managed to save from my grocery store job had gone to a mountain bike and a Clarion head unit, so I could barely scrape together a 4-figure number.

What I ended up with was a once-totaled, multicolor (brown and white, actually) ’79 Volvo 244 DL owned by the jock who was dating the girl I had a massive crush on. Galling, to say the least. Prior to committing electronic suicide via an exploding ignition coil, it taught me two things: electrical gremlins are not the exclusive purview of Britain’s best, and European cars FEEL different than Japanese cars. That feeling is solidity. The 244 hugged the road and drove with a stately purpose that was completely foreign to me.

But it wasn’t my Eleanor … my Eleanor wasn’t any one particular car, but a whole actually gaggle of cars: on Craigslist, on the street, driven in traffic, roaring around the woods with driving-lights flooding the treetops. It was a Volvo that actually looked halfway decent. No 470-pound bumpers protruding like a punched lip. It was clean, crisp, and classic – almost Italian in stance, but austere in its Scandanavianness. It was the Volvo 142, and it’s been haunting me for years. It bugged me so much that at one point, in a fit of desperation, I bought a ’71 145 off of eBay Motors, sight unseen, for a couple hundred bucks. I had no tools, no experience, and nowhere to put it. Beset with the worst carb timing ever to afflict a B18, it barely hacked and coughed into life, sputtering raw gasoline through the SU’s overflow right onto the cast iron exhaust headers. I unloaded it to a guy for a couple hundred bucks, who promptly swapped in new carburetors and drove it all the way to Portland on its threadbare tires. He is evidence that the 140-series love is both irrational and powerful.
At some point, my IPD-equipped, Cibie-festooned, plaid-insert-Recarro’d 142 will arrive to sweep me off my feet into some European fantasy world of class, safety, and reliability. Until then, I’ll be rattling around in a Japanese four-banger, burning myself on the seats, and dreaming about Sweden’s finest.
Images courtesy: Chaos Motorsports, VolvoAdventures.com , IMCDB.org