The Volvo T6 Concept Was A Hot Rod With A Swedish Six-Pot Heart

The Volvo of today doesn’t offer a huge amount for car enthusiasts. Its cars are lovely, but they’re all limited to a maximum of 112mph, and none come with anything bigger than a 2.0-litre four-cylinder engine. They’re meant for people who want to sit back in a lovely interior and watch the world go by, not drive around like someone's poured kerosene on their trousers and thrown a lit match in their pocket.

It wasn’t that long ago that things were different, and Volvo was sending its estate cars touring car racing and shoving a Yamaha-built V8 in the XC90. The company’s always embodied the warm, cosy and friendly aspects of its Swedish homeland, but in the ’90s and ’00s, the other side of Sweden could occasionally be seen in its cars, the one that was all vikings, death metal and Absolut Vodka.

That was no more evident than at the 2005 SEMA show, where Volvo North America showed off the T6 Roadster concept. Looking like a Plymouth Prowler had been fused with something out of a Fritz Lang movie, this was a hand-built, one-off concept made by mating various off-the-shelf Volvo parts with a custom tubeframe chassis, creating a mad, Scandi-flavoured homage to hot rod culture.

Under the bonnet, though, wasn’t the V8 you’d expect to find in this sort of car. As the name suggests, it was Volvo’s T6 twin-turbo straight-six, lifted from the S80 exec saloon. With no mention of any tweaks to it, it’s safe to assume it made the same 268bhp and 280lb ft as it did in the sensible, sedate S80, which would have been plenty in a car as minimalist as the T6 Roadster. Power was sent to the back wheels via Volvo’s five-speed Geartronic automatic.

Backing this up was plenty of serious chassis hardware. The rear subframes came from the S80, but the independent suspension arms were a custom job at both ends. At the front, there were carbon fibre leaf springs, but the real suspension party piece came at the rear, with inboard remote-reservoir Ohlins dampers.

The job of stopping the T6 was done by a set of six-pot callipers and 330mm discs up front, with the rears borrowed wholesale from the S80. The brakes were shrouded by a set of beefy five-spoke, 22-inch wheels.

Inside, meanwhile, despite plenty of bits – the seats, instruments, gear selector and pedals – all coming from the S80, the T6 managed to look fairly unique, helped in no small part by the addition of a retro chrome ring to the S60-sourced steering wheel.

So, were there ever any serious plans to build the T6? Of course not. Even during its wilder years, it would have been a niche too far for a company that, when it boiled down to it, still had safety and steadiness as its number one priorities. Even as nothing more than a headline-grabbing show car, though, it’s hard to imagine something like the T6 ever emerging from the Volvo of today.