Faults:

Soft roof lining at the rear corners of the convertible roof gets twisted when the roof is lowered and raised.

Satnav blanks out from time to time.

General Comments:

It feels like a luxury car with a comfortable ride, good seats and a silky smooth engine, with all the power you need on a British motorway.

The satnav has real-time advanced warnings of hold-ups, and with the cruise control and the characteristics just mentioned, it helps make motorway driving feel easy.

Petrol consumption is not great, especially in town. It's slightly better than my previous car, a 2.3L Honda Accord, but considering it's a more recent design, I would have expected better.

With the roof down, there is more turbulence than in a Mercedes SLK at high speed. You can buy a wind deflector, but this sits over the rear seats, and costs more than £200, so I don't think the buffeting is bad enough to warrant one.

I like the way the Volvo handbook tells you how to change bulbs: some manufacturers pretend you always have to go to a dealer, and Volkswagen even claim they need two men to change a side indicator repeater bulb on a Golf!

Although it's a convertible, the rear seats are comfortable and not cramped, and the cabin as a whole has a pleasant and high-quality feel.

Most coupe-cabriolets, or hard-top convertibles, look awkward, with oversized rear ends to accommodate the folded roof. The Volvo C70 is the best-looking of them all, either with the roof up or down.

The boot, with the roof down, is not too small (unless you go for the optional spare wheel, which sits in a bag on the boot floor and takes up a lot of room - otherwise you have to make do with a puncture repair kit). With the roof up, the boot is quite spacious.

It's a pity that Volvo chose to give the roof a soft inner lining that is supposed to fold in more places than the metal roof. Mercedes gave the SLK a rigid roof lining that seems to work better. As mentioned above, the soft lining on the Volvo doesn't always unfold correctly.

I haven't had this car for long, but I like almost everything about it. It's one of those cars that definitely has a "wow!" factor.

Faults:

Like most of the cars from the first version, its top had to be realigned.

General Comments:

Well, this was the car of a close friend of mine, so I had the opportunity to drove it many times.

It is a nice looking car..

It had the Dynaudio sound system (which words can't describe - AWESOME), GPS (Sat Nav), leather seats, electric seats, A/C, cruise control, etc etc... I think that it had every option that you could put on this car.

Let's talk of the driving experience...

The car is very very comfortable. It absorbs the bumps very well and gives you a relaxed trip. In fact, it was so comfortable that I totally forgot I was driving a 70 000€ car LOL!!

The clutch from what I can remember was soft, and the manual transmission was AWESOME. Fast and precise.

The engine was a bit of a let down. Compared to my S70 T5, it is noticeably less powerful. Once it passes the 215km/h, you can feel that it has not much power left to go up in the speedometer, although it does, very slowly :(... It is a 2.5 220bhp, but hell, I've read that this car weighs more than 1700kg (!!!)..

We've discussed many times that this car could have given much more excitement if it had at least the S60 T5 engine (260bhp)...

I know that this car was not designed to be a "racer" and by any means I'm saying that it's slow... but the 2.5 220bhp are not the best company for a car that weighs over 1700kg..

This was one of the easiest cars that I've ever driven.

He sold the car after 6 months and bought a S60 D5 190bhp diesel. The main reason was the economy.. Even if you drive it slowly, this car consumes a LOT of petrol...

Videos that we made of the car:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eDLjGm5GBk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaY_VhwYsSM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyjaPwCSC_Y (yes... it was cold and we know that's not a good thing.)

Sorry for my stupid filming!!