There’s only a limited amount of puns possible: a SAAB story

SAAB, or Svenska Aeroplan AktieBolaget, is currently just another GM nameplate to shill their other cars through (mostly Opels and Chevys, at the moment). When formed in the late 1940s, however, SAAB was one of the most unique and innovative automakers in the world. Having been primarily an airplane manufacturer, they brought an outsider perspective to a landscape of conservative auto manufacturing with such wild features as front-wheel-drive, a two-stroke engine (which is small and makes a lot of power at the expense of emissions and noise), and a car that was smaller than the aircraft carriers that most Americans were used to driving.

Needless to say, as a small, bizarre foreign car, most folks in this country just ignored the little SAABs. That’s a shame. The original SAAB, the 92, was an amazing little car. It was so aerodynamic that it matches one of the fastest cars in the world today, the Koenigsegg CCX, at 0.30 CD. (That’s also kind of a biased comparison, because with computers, even a modern Honda Accord can get a 0.30 CD. But for 1949, that was at least twice as good as most cars on the market.) It was designed by a bunch of aeronautical engineers who’d never made a car before, and as I mentioned before was a virtual testbed of new ideas. The front-mounted, transverse (across the car, rather than placed on the centerline) engine powering the front wheels allowed for amazing traction, allowing the little and underpowered car to win rally races on snow and dirt despite being up against bigger, faster opponents. This started a performance and rally-winning heritage that lasted for quite a while.

The car was gradually upgraded, with the 93 and later cars getting different engines and slightly different engineering. Eventually, the cars went to a longitudinally-mounted (along the centerline) setup but with front wheel drive, which was a layout that only one other automaker, Audi, adopted. With the 99 and the definitive 900 coming later, SAAB became one of the only enthusiast-oriented front wheel drive cars on the planet.

So what happened? SAAB began its long, slow tailspin with the arrival of the 9000, which was co-engineered with Fiat, Alfa Romeo, and Lancia. It was entirely different than the 900, not just an evolution of its design, and it lost a lot of the character that the 900 had. SAAB was purchased by GM shortly after this in 1990, and the 9000 was replaced by the 9-5, which was built on a GM chassis that was designed for the SAAB and its soon-to-be brother, the Opel Vectra. This lead the 900 to be replaced by the 9-3, which was also built on the Vectra platform.

I really hope you’ve followed the story so far, because if you did, you’d realize that at this point, GM had both of the SAABs they were selling on non-SAAB, GM platforms. And they were the same platform! Basically, you could get small GM or larger GM. That is what SAABs were by this point. And then they proceeded to sell the exact same cars until pretty much now. The 9-5 has been on sale, virtually unchanged, since 1997.

That’s clearly not how you market an automaker who is supposed to be fundamentally different as its primary selling point. In my opinion SAAB stopped living up to its own modus operandi when the 900 died. Without unique cars to sell, it’s just another GM brand, and that’s why it’s upcoming demise is not terribly troubling to me. It’s just sad.

[Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia, NYT]