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It’s usually called Cream Yellow or sometimes Gul Yellow, but its real name is T-5R Yellow, a pale, perfect shade for a pale, perfect car. For some reason, this car remains more popular than envied.
(Full disclosure: Volvo recently invited me to New Jersey to drive their 850 T-5R, though unlike the usual auto marketing pitches, I couldn’t see a reason for it. Volvo couldn’t really do that either, as one Volvo employee said: “It’s not like we’re trying to sell new 850 T-5Rs.” I commend Volvo for doing something with no apparent self-interest; other automakers, please note.)
The 850 T-5R may be more than envied for being front-wheel drive; possibly because almost all of them in the US are automatic; possibly because people with money are currently in a nostalgic 80s boom and not quite a 90s boom yet; possibly because only a three-digit number of 850 T-5Rs have been sold in America and unlike E30s, say, they just aren’t common enough.
I don’t know the reason, but I know a T-5R Yellow 850 T-5R went to Bring A Trailer Trail for $ 15,000 in May, and also a manual one. Maybe that’s because this particular 850 T-5R is in Canada; maybe that’s because that particular 850 T-5R is the less desirable sedan version of the car, rather than the car that competed in the British Touring Car Championship where it had aerodynamic advantages; maybe that’s because that particular car has over 200,000 miles; or maybe that’s because the 2.3-liter turbo five-cylinder engine only makes 240 hp, which isn’t much by modern standards.
I wasn’t the buyer of that particular 850 T-5R either. Maybe it should have been me, because I recently drove one – a 1997 850 T-5R sedan that Volvo Car USA has in its Heritage collection – and it was kind of like all of the old Volvos I got as a teenager in the late ones 90s, except that this one had power, luxury and everything worked. It was fantastic.
First, let’s stop and say a word about the performance of the 850 T-5R because in the 90s Here was the picture of the car and driver:
Paired with a smooth-shifting four-speed electronic automatic transmission (the only transmission available), our T-5R car reached 60 mph in just 6.7 seconds – three-tenths faster than our last 850 turbo car. […] This would be mind-boggling speed for any car – let alone one that could get the whole family out for a pancake dinner.
From my own ride, “blistering” isn’t quite the word I would use, but you have to understand that the 850 T-5R was pretty fast for its time. It did more or less what the BMW M3 did at the time. Do you know what else made 240 hp and went from zero to 60 mph in 6.7 seconds? A 1977 Ferrari 308 GTB.
Nowadays, if even a base 2021 Camry is over 200hp, 240hp is less special, but the thing about 240hp is that it’s … enough, especially for a car that weighs a little under 3,500 pounds and is probably the one best looking Volvo ever, with apologies to the 1800ES.
I say “best looking” because the boxiness here is a silent evolution of the boxy Volvo of the 1970s and 1980s and a pinnacle of Volvo styling when it was still recognizable from a distance. In contrast, modern Volvo seems to be all about taillights and corners. In the age of electric cars that require lean aerodynamics, boxiness is likely to never return to a car again, period.
That would be a shame if we didn’t already have the 850 T-5R, which has side airbags and three-point seat belts in the rear. The 850 T-5R has performance, looks, safety and a spoiler in one package. And as with all instant classics, nobody seemed to know at first.
As a Volvo employee explained to me, when the T-5R Yellow 850 T-5R came to the US, Volvo dealers couldn’t move it, and many of them ended up as company cars. Many people seem to share C & D’s assessment of color, which was that it threatened to cause “visual trauma,” but the thing about a lot of people is that they are often wrong.
Because the T-5R Yellow is majestic, something to celebrate in a modern world where there is only one new S60 in one of eight colors, five of which are white, black, or a shade of gray, and none of which is green. It’s true that T-5R Yellow is not for everyone, but that also means it probably is for you.
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