Why My Friends Pushed a Rare Vintage Volvo Off a Cliff

From Road & Track

There's a small group of friends here in Budapest who run a car enthusiast website called Turbometal. That's not how they make their living, but one of them shoots films and commercials to earn his bread. So when the crew is not busy organizing vintage moped meets, finding abandoned rarities and gas stations in the middle of nowhere or restoring the only long-wheelbase US-spec Isuzu pickup in the country, they grab their cameras, shooting stuff like the best thing one could come up with after having a Tesla for less than a day, as well as longer films that are good enough to have their premiers at a proper cinema long before they'd upload them to Youtube.

Turbometal's most ambitious project so far has been a film titled Volvo Rush. To turn their script into a few terabytes of raw HD-footage, they needed to buy a rear-wheel drive car for not a lot of money. In Europe, that doesn't leave you with too many options. The guys had some experience with BMW E21s, but after looking at a few of those as well as E30s, they decided to ignore them, as well as all those Ford Sierras that had lived three lifetimes already. Instead, they went for the most unlikely candidate of them all: A Volvo 360 GL.

In case you're unfamiliar with Volvo's 300-series cars, all you need to know is that in the mid-1970s, Volvo needed to buy DAF's car division-mostly to gain access to Renault's small displacement engines, DAF's compact platform and the markets of the European Economic Community, which Swedish manufacturers did not have access to at the time.

Hence the DAF-based Volvo 360 GL. Since they were the original innovators of the tech, DAF's original design featured a CVT gearbox at the rear, but buy the time Volvo rebranded everything and launched the 360 GL, the car had a proper five-speed and a 2.0 engine from the Volvo 200 Series instead of Renault's 1.4.

So, that's 110 horsepower in a rear-biased transaxle chassis made in Holland. What's not to like?

This old Volvo turned out to be so tail happy and reliable that the guys felt terrible about its destruction. But the script was set, and when you go as far as using a still-under-construction part of the highway totally illegally, borrowing a boat from a random fisherman to get the right angle, or dumping a car in an abandoned mine just to end up with something you and your friends can be proud of, a workhorse from the eighties is a small price to pay.

Without much further ado, please enjoy Volvo Rush, Turbometal's short movie about a certain troubled street racer. You should probably turn the subtitles on:

To finish it off, let's go behind the scenes:

Not seen: My Autobianci on location.