Especially with its top up, our lavishly restored 1957 model looks and feels more like a sport tourer than a sports car. Rolling down the rear quarter-windows is excruciating, as the regulators are tucked behind two small panels. There's luggage space behind the seats, probably enough for two golf bags, and the trunk is commodious for a sporting car. The "bucket" seats are more like a flat, split bench (they replaced "shell"-style seats, one of a few changes from 1956), and they have no rake adjustment. And the P1900 isn't as low to the ground as most 1950s sports cars. With its tall pontoon fenders, a square, stately grille that foreshadowed the grille on the 1969 to 1974 164 sedan, and piping accents--red on black for the top, boot, carpeting, and red piping across the cream-colored dash--and especially the chrome sailboat emblem that squares off the rear quarter-windows, there's something relaxed and nautical about the car. You'll think of Volvo Diesel's sailboat-engines.
The rounded, organic lines of the P1900's profile fit Sweden's postmodern clean-design sensibility. The minimalism extends to the exterior locks, on the driver side only (you have to open that, then unlock the
passenger door from inside--no room for chivalry). Open the forward-hinged hood, and you'll see a chain across the engine longitudinally, from the dash to the radiator, for cold-air shutoff.
So lift yourself out of that blonde-wood easy chair, plop into the elegantly spare crimson-leather driver's seat, and lower the top by releasing a couple latches and folding the top back. There are no safety belts--strange, considering the company was developing three-point seatbelts by then (seatback-mountings were still in the future), and there are some body-color, unpadded panels inside.
The driving position is unusually upright for a two-seater, and yet the hood looks Jaguar-long. A stereotypically tall Swede would have to swing his legs under the large-diameter, three-spoke banjo steering wheel, and his right leg would trigger the high-beam switch every time. Pull the choke, start it up, slide the big, trucky gearshift into first, and the P1900 launches with nothing close to a chirp. But 1000 rpm or so above idle, it's clear this is a torquey little 70-horse engine. With a 5500-rpm redline, you can glide around Miami's South Beach in first most of the time. Shifting into second is a big jump--this is a wide-ratio three speed--and you can just sit in this gear all day, until you're ready for freeway speeds. The floor-mounted clutch pedal feels spongy. The B14A's single exhaust tip provides a brappy exhaust note, the most sporting aspect of this sports car. The manual steering is hard at low speeds, but at least there's lots of feel.
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