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OTHER
than its price, which is a curious P1,688,888, nothing’s
extraordinary about the Volvo C30.
Truth
is, everything about it is extraordinarily outstanding.
It can
fly if you want it to. Even as it has a “mere” 2.4
liters.
It can
race the next fastest car in its class and, always, it’d
be a no-sweat affair.
 But
why think always of two-door cars as speed freaks?
Can’t a
two-door beauty be as femininely elegant, as prim and
proper as the late Lady Di?
The C30
can glide as gingerly into the sweet lane, and allow
gladly the field to just whizz by it.
The
engine murmur can hush you to sleep if you are a
passenger—even at 120kph.
The
softness of the steering wheel can make you relax all
through 105 km of nonstop driving.
It’s a
sporty vehicle, all right. But to me, it has the
semblance of a true-blue sports car.
Okay,
they won’t call it a sports car in the strictest sense
of the word. Fine.
But
because it’s a two-door, it can easily qualify as one,
right?
Not
really. The Beetle is a two-door but it isn’t a sports
car. Same with the C30.
Still, I
guess this C30 can match up with any sports car if
challenged, maybe, except, of course, by Schumi’s F1
demon.
It is
enough, though, that this Volvo piece of engineering
marvel is called the C30 Sports Coupe.
It’s a
two-door, all right, but not a two-seater; rather, it’s
a five-seater, with a more-than-enough cabin to boot.
 I
tagged along three friends one time and each one had a
luggage or two to stuff into the “trunk” of the C30.
Why, after all the loading was over, there was still
room for a mountain bike or the like, or even a golf set
maybe. Such unspeakable “cabinsatility!”
The
other pretty weirdness about the C30 is that it is so
un-Volvo like. Meaning, it doesn’t look like a Volvo at
all.
Seen
from afar—no, from maybe 15, 20 feet—it doesn’t appear
to be a Volvo. Its looks certainly defy established
conventions that if Volvo’s founders were alive today,
they would have been floored. Flabbergasted!
And
that’s where the big difference lies really—the C30 is
so un-Volvo and, yet, it performs very much like a
Volvo: comfortable, reliable, so intelligent like a real
sweet Swede. Like a Bjorn Borg in his tennis prime.
The
world, indeed, is changing and that scene from the
classic, period film set in Tsarist Russia, “Fiddler On
The Roof”, quickly comes to mind: A lad had asked a lass
for a dance and the lass angrily answered, “But girls
are not allowed to dance with boys!”
The lad
said, “Oh, my lady, the world is changing.”
And so
they danced, breaking age-old tradition.
In 1927
two pioneering Swedes made a promise to the world: “The
things you hold dear are the treasures out of our life,
too. The hope you carry for your family is the hope we
carry for ours. The dreams you dream for the future
inspire us as well. And we promise that these things
are more valuable than gold or silver. These things
will stay with us every second of every day. They
should be reflected in everything we think of and
everything we do. And we promise we will never forget
what it means to be alive.”
Gustaf
Larson and Assar Gabrielsson, the Volvo inventors, have
long moved on to the Great Beyond, but 81 years to the
day they had made their promise of a great car, their
vision of crafting a great car like Volvo lives on and
on and on.
The
Volvo evolution—it never really ends. |
