speed

Old Volvo Wagons Are a V-8 Swap From Serious Speed

By Jaime E. Love 6 months ago

From Car and Driver

From the June 1997 issue of Car and Driver.

“I’m a little worried if you mention Paul Newman,” says Ross Converse, a former aircraft mechanic whose primary business since 1988 has been selling simple kits to slot Mustang V-8s into rear­-drive Volvos.

Converse, a soft-spoken 46-year-old Mainer, is more concerned that Indy-car team owner and actor Newman will be angry with him for divulging a secret: Known fast-car lover and salad-dressing-­and-salsa salesman Newman tools around his home base in Connecticut in a V-8-powered Volvo 960 wagon built by Converse.

See, one of the advantages of having a V-8-powered Volvo, especially in the Northeast, is that Swedish cars blend into the traffic like Toyotas in Tokyo. Cops and autograph hounds normally tend not to notice ubiquitous Volvo station wagons.

The other reason is this: A Volvo wagon weighs only 100 pounds more with an

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2020 is the wrong year to launch a car, but Czinger is moving full speed ahead

By Jaime E. Love 7 months ago


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Los Angeles-based startup Czinger has remained relatively quiet since it unveiled the 21C, a 3D-printed plug-in hybrid hypercar, in February. Its plans to present the model at the 2020 Geneva auto show were derailed when the event was canceled, and it decelerated its operations to comply with California’s COVID-19-related lockdowns, but work never stopped behind the scenes. We caught up with the brand to get a better idea of where it stands.

Jens Sverdrup, the young brand’s chief commercial officer, told Autoblog engineers began testing prototypes on the road and on the track in August 2019. “This is not one of these stories where you see new companies coming out with a mockup or a computer rendering; we have fully functioning cars, and we’ve spent seophee.com/seo-dallas.html a significant amount of money on them,” he said. Testing abruptly stopped in the spring, fine-tuning a

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