Project Car Hell, 850 Days in Hades Edition: BMW 850i or Volvo 850 T5R?

project car hell 850 bmw volvo
It's Germany versus Sweden in the battle of the 850s!

By: Murilee Martin on 11/17/2011

Last week's basket-case Borgward versus decrepit DKW Project Car Hell Challenge featured a couple of cute European commuter machines of the 1950s. So this week we're going to change it up with a couple of high-buck, high-performance European statusmobiles of the 1990s. The magical thing about such costly machines--the BMW and Volvo ones, anyway--is the blistering acceleration of their rates of depreciation. That's bad news for those who bought them new but good news for those of us who want to use our unwarranted optimism mechanical skills to turn a temperamental money vacuum rough-around-the-edges 1990s classic into a stylish and quick daily driver. What do today's two choices have in common, other than having had flashy orthodontists as original owners? The 850, the number of the Hell Project Beast!

bmw 850 project car hell
The rather expensive to own BMW 850i.

The BMW 8-series was one of the most beautiful machines those crazy Bavarians ever produced, but the end of free S&L money for shady financial types dried up much of the pool of potential buyers, and then the early-1990s recession and the fuel-price-jolting Persian Gulf madness delivered a couple of tire-iron-to-the-kidneys blows to sales of conspicuously consuming German coupes. That means that the E31s are tough to find today, but it doesn't mean that they're particularly expensive.

While skeptics might point out that maddeningly undiagnosable ECM problems and cripplingly expensive transmission failures make ownership of an E31 somewhat costly, we in the Hell Project Garage feel that one look at the car should convince you that you need an 8-series. We're going to rule out the 840, because its V8 was far too reliable for our purposes; Project Car Hell is all about cars that are worth the agony. That's why you need a V12-powered E31; just watch the TV commercial for the 90 to see what we mean. You'd think that an 850 project car would be tough to find, but you'd be wrong. A quick search of Craigslist will unearth plenty of reasonably priced examples. Say, this 1991 850Ci in Bakersfield, Calif., (go here if the listing disappears) for a Nissan Sentra-grade 5,000 bucks. Five grand! For a car that listed new at $77,700 (or $123,000 in 2011 dollars)!

What's the catch, you ask? No catch,just a few minor issues that you'll have sorted out in no time. The seller is a man or woman of few words, and here they are: "The car has been sitting for three years.Transmission needs to be repaired. Lost the key to the car and needs a battery. Some minor details." So, it's got a bad transmission; we can't tell whether it's the manual or the automatic (transmission type is one of those details that most Craigslist car seller find unimportant), but if it's the latter you'll have your pick of junked 750iLs as parts donors. Do 7-series transmissions bolt into an 8-series? Did every single V12 7-series in the junkyard get there because of a bad transmission? So many questions! Then there's the lost key, so you won't be able to start it during the tire-kicking phase, and the slightly troubling "minor details." None of that stuff matters, because when you're done, you'll have a 296-hp German V12 coupe in your driveway.

volvo 850 t5r autoweek project car hell
A Volvo 850 T5R for your factory-hot-rod-hell garage!

Big, fast BMWs are pretty cool, but they're just so obvious. When you're serving your 850 days in the Lake of Fire Garage, you want your 1990s factory hot rod to be something a bit more unusual. Something Swedish. The 850 was Volvo's first front-wheel-drive machine, so it made perfect sense to boost the hell out of the five-cylinder engine and get 222 torque-steering horses out of just 2.3 liters of displacement. After consulting with Porsche on the drivetrain and the interior, Volvo produced the mighty T5R.

Not many were sold in North America, what with a price tag of $33,135 (about $47,000 today) and a performance image running somewhat counter to Volvo's core buyer demographic of the time, but you'll have no problem finding many priced-to-sell T5s to choose from today. If you insist on a car with actual T5R badging, you'll need to stick with 1995 models only, but this 1997 850 T5 (go here if the listing disappears) has the same wild interior and 222 hp. Wait, did we say 222 horses? According to the seller, the "upgraded ECU" in this car results in "260/280" horsepower (no doubt by adding more boost and more timing advance to an already extremely nervous engine). Then it has an IPD intake and OBX intercooler, for those "Volvo tuner" touches that let you know that this car has been flogged mercilessly enjoyed as its designers intended.

All of those mods, in the seller's words, "give the car more gas mileage and also increases the speed!" He'll take $4,000, or $3,500 cash in hand, another illustration of the brutality of 1990s Volvo depreciation. Sure, the photographs are remarkably unhelpful, in spite of two of them being quite sharply focused by Craigslist-car-ad standards, but you know that the missing grille is the only cosmetic problem. Right? Right!

At this point, you're probably thinking of all those horror stories you've heard about the fragile head gaskets, flaky oil and coolant lines, and gouge-o-riffic parts prices for 1990s Volvos. Banish those thoughts right now! Instead, imagine what your T5R will be like once you've added even more boost (courtesy of the biggest turbocharger you can shoehorn into the engine compartment), replaced the missing grille and who knows what else and have gotten down to the business of blasting the tread off the front tires.


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