When the shed door swung open for the first time in decades, sunlight spilled onto a Volvo that hadn’t budged since Jimmy Carter was still working in the Oval Office.
When the shed door was finally cracked open after all those years, a beam of light settled on a car that had been frozen in place since the Carter administration. Dust blanketed nearly everything, yet the silhouette gave it away instantly — that long front end and the squared rear glass of a Volvo P1800 ES. After 47 years in the exact spot where its owner parked it, the car was back in daylight.
Its owner, Ron — a Navy veteran who passed away last week at 90 — had bought the Volvo used sometime in the mid-’70s. He drove it home, tucked it inside a backyard shed he built himself, and aside from a few brief moments of idling and inching it around the garage, never really drove it again.
The car’s last registration sticker dated to December 1978. Since then, it sat unchanged, year after year. Now Ron’s son-in-law, Andy, finally made the call that set everything in motion.
That call went to Johnny Smith of The Late Brake Show, known for pulling long-forgotten machines out of barns and garages and coaxing them back toward life.
And when Johnny heard the words “P1800 ES” — the wagon-style sister to the coupe Roger Moore once drove in The Saint — he knew he couldn’t pass it up.
Andy warned him ahead of time: Ron never really let go of the Navy. He kept a sailor’s vigilance about anything related to moisture, drainage, and corrosion. If he cared about something, he kept it bone-dry.
The shed itself proved the point. It was overbuilt, oversealed, practically ship-tight. Ron had stuffed insulation into nooks and crannies, shaped little drainage channels, wrapped seams with tar paper. He may have stopped driving the Volvo, but he never stopped fussing over it.
That mindset also explained the strange state of the car. The chrome trim had been carefully removed. The bumpers were off. “Beauty rings” were stacked on the roof like dishes waiting to be washed.
He had even removed the fuel tank — for reasons no one alive can fully explain — from a car that otherwise ran fine. The original starter motor had been pulled out and half-prepped for paint.
Even minor brackets and hose clamps were coated in various brush-on finishes, none of which matched anything Volvo had ever offered. According to Andy, Ron planned to clean up the chrome and redo the brakes.
But that Navy precision caused the job to fracture into dozens of small tasks — and then life happened. Kids, work, responsibilities. The Volvo stayed exactly where it sat.
Even smothered in grime, the P1800 ES was unmistakable. The short-run “Sport Wagon” from 1972–1973 had been rare even in its day, and now it borders on mythical.
Its all-glass tailgate, long nose, and unmistakable profile made it Volvo’s early take on the shooting-brake idea before the term went mainstream. The Fawn Brown paint had long since faded, but it was still the original color.
Johnny half-expected to find the earlier B18 1.8-liter engine — the same engine family that powered Irv Gordon’s record-breaking 3.2-million-mile P1800 — but this one carried the later B20F, a 2.0-liter fuel-injected four-cylinder rated at 112 horsepower. Paired with a four-speed manual, it wasn’t a pure sports car, but it was built to survive the ages.
It was the sort of engine you could ignore for years, give fresh fuel, and maybe — just maybe — coax back to life. Assuming all the parts were still where they belonged.
Johnny and Andy began the slow process of clearing space. The shed was tightly packed around the car. They aired up the tires, fully expecting them to split after half a century, but remarkably, the old rubber inflated and held air.
With a bit of effort, the Volvo rolled out. When Johnny stepped behind it to check the rear underside, the car began quietly rolling back toward the shed, forcing cameraman Phil to jump in and stop it before it disappeared inside again.
Once fully in the open, the P1800 ES looked like it had traveled straight out of another era. With its trim missing, the front end looked almost cartoonishly expressive — Johnny joked that it had a hint of Sid from Ice Age.
Inside, though, the car was pristine. Dusty, yes, but untouched. The black leather seats showed no cracks. The dashboard was flawless. Even the steering wheel looked like it had been waiting all these years for a weekend drive.
Under the hood, the original battery and spark plugs were still in place. Much of the wiring hadn’t been touched since disco dominated radio. Johnny started assembling a mental checklist: new battery, oil in the cylinders, cleaning the ignition points, and using an external fuel source before trying to turn the engine over by hand.
Then came the discovery that stopped the plan cold. The original starter motor — the one Ron had removed to repaint — had no bolts. Without them, the engine couldn’t be turned by the starter at all. And the bolts were nowhere to be found.
Johnny dug through bins full of hand-painted parts — some vital, some completely unnecessary, all coated in random finishes that only Ron himself would have understood. Andy admitted that even the family had no idea why so many pieces had been painted.
Right now, the Volvo is a puzzle its creator never finished. But after 47 silent years, it has finally been brought back into the open. And now it’s waiting for someone patient enough to sort through its pieces, finish what Ron started, and give the old car a chance to return to the road again.