this car is parked a few blocks from my house. I saw it a few times passing by, but unfortunately, I wasn’t fast enough to take pictures. It is just a ordinary ugly white Volvo 440 which was build in Born, a small town in the south of the Netherlands. However, this isn’t just a 440, it is an Estate conversion, done by the company Toncar. Volvo didn’t like it and tried to stop the conversion programme. That’s why there aren’t that many around.
Because the 440 is a hatchback/liftback the conversion is very simple , they just changed the boot lid. The conversion is also easily transferred to another 440. This white monster has a nasty dent with some rust. the 400 series of volvo was started with the coupe 480, with later on the 440 and the 460. In the Netherlands the 400 serie was a verry succesfull car and they can be found almost in every street. You hate them or you love them. I hate them, what do you think?
9 responses so far ↓
1 Huib // Sep 24, 2007 at 13:25
What a strange car!at first, you think it’s a normal estate, but when you look close the pictures show a funny car!!! Nice pics!!!
2 Rolph // Sep 27, 2007 at 2:26
Toncar? What else did they do? Why didn’t appreciate Volvo the conversion?
3 Jos T // Oct 15, 2007 at 1:24
this car is ugly! volvo makes lots of ugly cars, but this is ugly even for volvo!
4 Jan // Nov 1, 2007 at 1:41
As far as I know, Toncar made other conversions as well. But I forgot where I read it. Probably in “Autodesign in Nederland”, by Jan Lammerse, but I’ll have to look it up.
5 Rolph // Nov 13, 2007 at 0:56
Cool, the owner has discovered this posting, Jur! Or so it seems.
Check:
http://www.volvo-forum.nl/viewtopic.php?t=1040&start=75
all thanks to the statistics on the site for spotting the referrer
6 jur // Nov 13, 2007 at 8:13
so it seems.
i´m not sure he likes it but there are no complains jet.
to bad its for sale! know i probebbly won´t see it any more. good luck new owner.
7 Jan // Nov 13, 2007 at 14:38
Buy it then, it shouldn’t be very expensive…
8 philippeimac // Jan 8, 2010 at 23:23
is it possible to a bit farrer than just saying it is beautiful or it is ugly?
This conversion is very well done in terms of quality of the realisation and in terms of design.
I mean the extended fifth door is well intergrated to the body of the hatchback car. Some other cars like Renault 25 or Lancia had the same kind of conversions during the eighties.
Now it was quite expensive and made by small companies.
Now Volvo at that time was absolutely not supporting them. Most well known of this small companies attemps was the cabriolet version of the 480 coupe: well designed, well built but refused by Volvo. Too bad that good ideas are not better supported.
Eventually that kind of conversion totally collapse by the early 90ies and to me no other models are on the market today. It is true that theere are lots of breaks in a wide range of various models today anyway.
I like this kind of ideas and I like the typical look of the Volvo (which is not frozen but subtily evolves between the generations).
I do say I find this car very interesting and not ugly at all but this is not the main quality of this model overall.
9 Jan // Jan 29, 2010 at 13:56
Volvo has made at least 2 prototypes, one in Holland and one in Sweden of a 480 convertible
Leave a Comment