Very sound advice from the chaps Nick.
But on the other hand. Two months ago I hired a Volvo V40 with all the extras, it had red lights on the wing mirrors that lit up when something was in your blind spot. A head up display on the windscreen that lit up red if you were too close to the car in front, a steering wheel shaker that resisted lane changes if you didn't indicate first. It had another head-up warning if the car thought there was a risk of a collision and I believe it was also capable of braking automatically if the risk became great enough.
The full beam headlights dipped automatically when a car came the other way and the wipers came on by themselves when it started raining. There were probably other automatic things for safety reasons that I didn't discover.
I HATED IT.
It was the Volvo philosophy of safety and reliability to the exclusion of any sort of enjoyment that sucks the pleasure out of driving. I understand that this may make me sound like a dangerous idiot on the road, but I don't think that that's the case. I enjoy driving safely and well. I enjoy concentrating on driving, anticipating what's happening around me and I don't trust a computer to do that for me.
The only other Volvo I've driven was an 80s estate that as Larry said was built like a tank . . . . and drove like one as well. It had plenty of power but you needed it to get the huge mass to accelerate. Is it hilly where you live?
It may have been reliable and was probably safe in an accident if you fell asleep from the boredom of driving it.
I know nothing about the Ulysses but some makes of car have an undeserved reputation for unreliability based on what they were like in the 1970s. According to reliabilityindex.com the Ulysses has a much better than average rating for reliability, and the problems it did have were on average cheap to fix. I've owned two Fiats and driven others frequently and one thing in common was a sense of fun to drive them. I wouldn't class them as unreliable but the older ones were a bit prone to rust. But then most cars in the 70s and 80s were.
If you go to
http://www.reliabilityindex.com/ and look at the bottom 10 cars for reliability you'll see that they are all prestige cars. Mercedes do particularly badly with BMW, Audi, and Porsche in there too.
I'd advise you to drive both, get them checked by a mechanic if there's no guarantee as they're both pretty old, and then decide which one you like being in and which one you'd like to see parked on your drive. You may like the Volvo (my brother loves them) or you may find that the Fiat is more to your taste.
Jon
