Navy Blue Volvo Station Wagon 850

Jul 10th, 2011, by Alex Zorach

This photo shows a navy blue Volvo Station Wagon 850. People like to joke about the demographics of Volvo owners, so you can speculate based on the New Jersey plates, the fact that this car was parked in West Philadelphia, and the visible stickers reading: "Johns Hopkins Engineering" and "Rutgers College of Pharmacy".

About the car, I have driven this particular model, but not this particular car. This model marked a particularly frustrating transition to me on the part of Volvo station wagons, in that the design moved from smaller supports between the windows in the back and on the sides, to very large, bulky ones. Accordingly, the visibility of these cars diminished greatly. I found this made the cars trickier and more stressful to drive in city conditions. I also found that this particular model exhibited a greatly reduced turning radius, which made city navigation more difficult, and parallel parking much more difficult.

Contrast this with the earlier Volvo 940 Station Wagon, which incidentally, was parked directly across the street from this car. In spite of the higher number, that was an older model, and that model still had the great visibility in the rear and side of the car.

I found that this model of car handled much better at high speeds and on highways than my old DL station wagon. However, it was clumsy in the city. As highway driving is generally easy, and city driving is difficult and stressful, I'd prefer a car that is more maneuverable in tight conditions and at slow speeds. I am not a speed demon, so while I felt comfortable taking this car well over 70mph (something that always felt dangerous in my old DL station wagon) this is a benefit I never used.