A 240 with a cool story

This winter I came across a deal I just couldn't pass up. A 1992 Volvo 240 for the low low price of just $400. It didn't run but I quickly identified the issue as a worn through crank pos sensor, so I purchased the car and hauled it home where I let it sit until this month when work began on making it run and drive.


Here is an excellent picture of it getting some new tires, brakes, and a general tuneup. It certainly needed it with over 310,000 miles on the clock.



I figured I would go through the glove box since it seemed to have a ton of service records and I was surprised to find that my new Volvo has a unique early life story.

The glovebox contained all of the service records for the past 310,000 miles back to 0. The odd thing was, the services up to 30,000 kilometers were performed by a dealership in Wurzburg Germany.

Further looking through the papers showed that indeed the first 29924 kilometers of the cars life were spent cruising the streets of Germany before it was imported to the United States by the Volvo Tourist and Diplomatic Sales Department in 1995. This is backed up by the Volvo Special Delivery sticker, which is still in place on the right rear window to this day.

I simply can't believe that a car which spent the first bit of its life in Germany is now driving the streets of the rural midwest United States with the original engine, transmission, and even the original set of keys! How cool is that!

Here are a couple of pics of the first page in the service booklet

Not too uncommon. Probably owned by someone in the military. My family once looked at an '85 245GL that had been purchased in Europe. US spec car, but had a gold dealer badge below the "VOLVO" on the tailgate. Didn't pass the repair shop's inspection, so we wound up picking up a Canadian spec '85 245DL instead.

Seems like that 244 has been all over the place, being serviced at Volvo of Tacoma (as it's called now) in 1995, after being serviced at a dealer in Texas earlier that year.

-J

Cool car in a cool color. Enjoy!

After that service in Washington it had a couple more services on the west coast, and then it had its next one in Wisconsin and then Minnesota. This car is better traveled than I am.

Sounds like a military member owned it. All the places are bases.....
All your base are belong to us.

Nice car! Take good care of it. It’s biceto find a car that actually had service records.

That is a great color - congrats!

Nice car and great story. My 89 245 started out as a Volvo corporate car, serviced by the Volvo North American Headquarters in New Jersey for the first three years.

I owned a wagon here in CA that the OG owner bought in Canada, had shipped to Germany (where he worked as a diplomat) then brought back to the states.

It was kind of cool seeing all of the inspection reports and receipts in German for a period of the car's life.

Neat. Same story with my 1990 744. It was driven somewhere in Europe (a few places in Europe IIRC) by a corporal in the military.