Saab cars went into bankruptcy just before Christmas. There is tons about it on the web, so I don't really need to describe the ins and outs of the long and painful slide from being sold by GM to Spyker and "Swedish Automobile," to the rather demeaning attempts at sale to the nobody Chinese firms Pang Da and Youngman.
I'm writing about this now because I had to pop into the local Saab dealership in Ipswich to have an engine management problem looked at. (It turns out that the turbo vacuum hose had a small hole in the side, most likely caused by a marten, the famous "Marderbiss" in German.) I had to wait a while, just over an hour, for my car to be looked at and repaired, so I had time to sit in the upstairs waiting area to read a 1987 history of Saab-Scania, and to sit in the latest and last Saab, the 9-5 Aero turbo 4.
The book was full of hope and pride of Saab Cars, noting its original raison d'être of being an emergency occupation for thousands of Svenska Aeroplan workers who were no longer needed for aircraft manufacture in the post WWII years. It was always a bit of a side-show for SAAB the company.
The 9-5 was rather nice and sitting in it made me feel slightly melancholy about a brand that I have always appreciated from the days of the 900 Turbo. It had all the equipment: HUD, gear-changing flaps behind the steering wheel and a nice big old turbo engine. I rather liked the styling; there were a lot of subtle details in there that set the Saab design language in a modern context. The interior was less successful (rather too black and with some rather perplexing discontinuities in there).
One of the big problems about it all is that none of the tech really belonged to Saab. Suppliers and GM owned all the technology. Saab repackaged it nicely but no longer sufficiently uniquely. There was talk in Feb 2009 of Saab being the "Apple of the auto world", but ultimately there was nothing compelling in knowing that GM platforms were the Intel chippery inside.
As I write this, there is talk of the bones of Saab being bought by Mahindra and Mahindra. I still doubt that they will be able to keep the Saab name, as the aircraft manufacturer would like its name back in reasonably good order. But if a car based on the 9-5 can be resurrected along with the next 9-3 and Saab can keep its engineers, then there would be a chance of it being as successful as the Indian owned Jaguar Land Rover. We shall see...
