A Volvo Amazon 122S has finally clocked out of family duty after 46 years, but it is not heading for the scrapheap. Far from it.
Bohdan and Marian Antoniw bought their four-door Amazon 122S in December 1980 from a retailer in Greenwich, South London.
Since then, it has done the sort of work old family cars rarely get full credit for. It brought their two children home from hospital. It towed a micro-caravan. It stayed in the family long enough to become less of a car and more of a relative with number plates.
Now the Antoniws have moved into a fully electric Volvo EC40, collected from Donalds Volvo Ipswich.
Their next trips include longer-distance plans, including Berlin, and that pushed them towards something newer, quieter and easier to live with. The EC40 is Volvo’s coupe-SUV EV, with up to 555km of range in UK specification.
The family stayed with Volvo partly after visiting their son Thomas in New York. He also drives a Volvo, so the brand loyalty has clearly spread across generations.
The Amazon, meanwhile, gets its own retirement plan. Volvo Car UK bought the car from the Antoniws and will restore it sympathetically before adding it to its UK heritage fleet. The timing works neatly, as Volvo approaches its centenary next year.
Volvo Car UK managing director Nicole Melillo Shaw said the company was touched that the family had trusted Volvo to restore the car, adding that the EC40 felt like a natural next step for them.
Bohdan Antoniw said the family would miss the Amazon because it had been with them for so long and was fun to drive.
“If cars have a spirit, we like think it would be happy knowing a new generation has taken its place,” he said.
