The Volvo P1800 was among Europe’s finest coupes in the 1960s and 1970s together with several products in the same category from Germany and Italy. It was launched originally in 1961 and remained in production until 1973, which is a rather long life cycle by today’s standards. But even though it was on the production lines for more than a decade, only about 39,000 examples from the coupe version were built. Not many of them are still alive and on the road and you can probably imagine how precious an abandoned and found P1800 can be these days.
This is what motivated us to share this 14-minute video with you, our fellow Motor1.com readers. At a glance, it may not seem like a typical barn find video from an auto enthusiast but feel free to skip the first about nine minutes and jump over to the point where a hidden P1800 reveals itself. We don’t know much about the location where this video was shot but we know for sure it was somewhere in the United Kingdom. But that’s really not the important part here.
The vehicle in question seems to be from an earlier model year P1800 but we can’t really see the car in its full glory and can’t tell much. The overall condition isn’t particularly great but the good news is that there don’t seem to be big parts missing. Of course, we don’t know what’s going on under the hood but the wheels and some other exterior parts are all stored inside the cabin.
A big part of the P1800’s popularity among car enthusiasts and collectors probably comes from the fact that the Swedish coupe holds a Guinness record as the vehicle with the highest certified mileage driven by the original owner in non-commercial service. That category may sound a little too niche but the truth is Irv Gordon of East Patchogue, New York, covered more than 3.2 million miles with his 1966 Volvo P1800 before passing away in November 1918.
Last but not least, if you’d rather simply own and drive a P1800 instead of restoring an abandoned example, Cyan Racing has a solution for you. The company sells its restomoded version of the coupe in the United States where it has a starting price of around $700,000. Cyan Racing’s P1800 retains the car’s original exterior but combines it with modern technologies all around.
