Our daughter grew up with Volvos.
Our first family Volvo was a tidy '74 142, then a very fast silver '82 Turbo wagon.
Her first car was a jet black 83 245t and she liked to say, "It has room for one cute boy and 2 spares!"
A few years ago, we passed on to her our 2002 XC70, which she immediately fell in love with.
When fitted with its very aggressive set of Hakkapeliitta studded snow tires, it's almost unstoppable in winter.
She named it "Blue" and it was perfect for her commute, camping and mountain adventures around Colorado.
Earlier this fall, "Blue" was totaled by a high-speed deer strike out on the sage flats south of Salida, CO.
Our term for roadside deer is "Sandbags on stilts". And they are just about that smart, too.
On the upside, it didn't come through the windshield, no one was injured and everyone but the deer and the vehicle is OK.
I've put dashcams in all my cars because young inattentive/texting drivers keep running into & totaling them and then lying about it, and just a month before her birthday present was a dashcam for Blue
To see the dash-cam video of how fast this happened, either click on or open in a new window the image below or try this link... Volvo Deer Strike (You may have to enable pop-up windows for flickr.com).
[Caution - not for the sensitive - contains screams, a loud 4-letter utterance, and the tumbling aftermath of a high-energy deer impact]
The fact the deer was just in front of the reflective sign made it much harder to initially discern.
And her boyfriend earned major dad points for his immediate gold-star response.
We had it towed to a repair shop near home, where it was officially declared totaled.
It was in such good shape otherwise that, with the encouragement of Abscate here, we decided to buy it back from the insurance company and make a run at resurrecting it ourselves.
It required about $500 in replacement parts: hood, radiator+intercooler+AC condensor, grill, bumper cover, head & fog lights, power steering pump & line, radiator support, etc
And a lot of measuring, hammering and restraightening in the passengers front corner.
We were fortunate that there were lots of donor XC70s in the yards and almost everything was bolt-on replaceable.
But the fact that there are subtle differences in some of the parts, like the PS pump, did cost us some time.
After about 5 days worth of parts hunting in the boneyards and hard restoration work in the garage, Blue is back on the road!
The hood color match is very close, but not exact. That's easy to fix once a matching XC70 shows up in the yards.
We even upgraded her to the $$$ late model HID lamps.
Needless to say, our daughter is over the moon.
