Very interesting comments on SAABs. As swedes whose first car love is Volvo, we like our SAABs too, though overall we see them as third behind Peugeots.
We have had SAABs and still have a final year classic 900 and we are in the SAAB club, which is forever sending out these brilliant announcements with triumphant fanfare of SAAB's sales target achievements and more, but GM has yet to make a penny from SAAB.
It sounds like you, Gary, did not venture into 9000 territory. Few people did! This was a car whose attributes were little appreciated, most of which were rather overshadowed by other elements of the car-- in the beginning, the fact that it was not enough like other SAABs according to the hardcore SAABists for one. But these subtle attributes made the 9000 the most lovely pleasure to live with day in and day out (when it was running). When the Swedish family sold off the second half of the company to GM back in 1994, the feeling in Sweden was very strange and quite sad and rather demoralized. There were those of us who said that GM would do best just to close the company, let the name live on its achievements, and smartly scatter the SAAB engineers throughout GM to begin to bless GM products with the Swedish intelligence of design. GM would be better off today (well, OK almost anything done could have made GM better off today, so that's not saying much), but I believe the way
GM has not made any money from SAAB, while at the same time making less and less on anything but trucks when they boomed, sort of shows that GM did chart a tough path for the company. In Sweden, it was understood that SAAB was a maker of niche cars, even before those terms were used in the car world. To try to take a brand with very narrow appeal, a true niche brand, into markets across the spectrum of industry offerings...hmmm...while it might seem like an equation for mass success to a car giant whose own success came from mass mass assembly, marketing, and sales, it seems like a hard hard thing to do well or with much financial reward.
We hate the new SAABs, not because they are bad cars or poor performers, but because they do not embody the traditional SAAB Swedish values. A saab now is like a poor excuse for trying to hold on to a heritage. Six cylinders anywhere near a SAAB absolutely flies in the face of pre-1992 SAAB mores! More generally, actually, if the new SAABs were not called SAABs, we would like them a lot better, because they do achieve what they try to do very well, and we would not judge them by the standards of SAABs when SAAB was just SAAB. At that time, you could put a Vabis next to a SAAB 900 or 9000 and consider their common attributes and see a clear consistent pursuit of design ideals. Not so with a new SAAB and a 9000, let alone an old Vabis! (Vabis was an acient Swedish car company, probably the very first, which merged with Scannia, which merged with the Swedish Aircraft Combine, or S A A B, Svensk Aeroplane Aktie Bolaget.) SAAB is the only car company to produce NOTHING but
front wheel drive, ahem, well until an SUV was forced on them...and I do mean forced! Volvo had been playing around for years, going back to the late eighties, investigating the question of making a SAFE SUV, but SAAB never even asked one engineer to think about an SUV! SAAB of old knew its focus and it kept at it with a great singularity of purpose that is necessarily absent today. Volvo was a different kind of company from SAAB, one which ALWAYS had visions of mass marketing and world success with numerous models across the full car market, going back to the prototype Volvo Phillip with its V8, merely 20 years after Volvo's beginning, and even earlier its all fiberglass sports convertible made by Glaspar in California [same company to pen and manufacture the earliest corvettes]...yeah a 1940's swedish company making a car to be driven with its removable hard top OFF! Was that one going to sell in Sweden?????
I am digressing but it is interesting to note that in the late 1960's, Volvo looked FAR into the future and knew that companies its size were not going to be able to remain independant! Starting from the late 1960's and going into the early 1970's, Volvo repeatedly engaged SAAB about a merger to galvanize the Swedish car industry! Of course by today's standards, that company would not really be big or terribly strong, but SAAB would not have had to work with the Italians for its first all new model ever, and Volvo would not have had to take itself to near bankruptcy to produce the $2.5 billion dollar car that saved the company from extinction, the 850. And the idea of a car with the attributes of an 850 AND those of a 9000 coming to market years before the 850 FINALLY did (which did save volvo!) is a wonderful thing, at least to Swedes! Go sit in a SAAB 9000 back seat for a few minutes. SANTA CLAUS COULD SIT ON your LAP and there would still be more room than in most bigger
cars. Now open the door. SEE HOW WIDE THAT DOOR OPENS? Only one other car has that, and that other company's is STILL not that wide (and SAAB doesnt have that anymore either)!
I could go on and on about outstanding little design elements...
I used to marvel at the things my 9000 could do...when it was running...over 140 mph from less than 1.9 liters (and 3100 lbs); 34 miles per gallon at sane highway speeds; accomodate my 7 foot tall uncle so easily even in getting in and out that he said, WHAT IS THIS CAR? i HAVE NEVER FELT SO normal of proportion IN ANY OTHER car ; carry a sofa in the back with the seat down; carry a refrigerator the same way; stand up to the absolute brutal pounding I felt confident in letting my friends expose it to; accelerate exasperatingly, far quicker than my friends' 928 V8 and Mustang 5.0 V8; walk away from a any BMW from 75 to 130 mph; AND CRASH AND FOLD AND DIE to protect us inside it if it needed to, so well that inside wouldnt even look like there was a crash! (SAAB used to advertise in Europe, "Volvo is a nice car, but why not drive something safer?" lol after Volvo stopped making the 240, the 9000 was the car made with the lowest fatality rate of all cars ever measured....8 deaths
to volvo 240's .6 deaths. if you know stastistics, that is pretty amazing comparing the power output of a volvo 240 and a SAAB 9000s, about 2/3 of which were 200 or more HP turbos.)
The worst thing to me to see now is in wrecking yards. Years ago, you never ever ever saw a SAAB mangled beyond recognition in the bone yards. Now you do, and all the time. But buyers still hear of that SAAB safety heritage, as so many of them think new SAABs are really something unusually safe. Per traditional Swedish SAAB standards, new ones are not.
So, if GM had just brought those new "SAABs" in as Opels, people like me could trumpet what good cars they were for GM, instead of what lesser cars they are for SAAB. Yeah, even though some of them do perform so well.
Maybe it's GM is just too good at not making any money with entire brand names.
Jay
Relax. Yahoo! Mail virus scanning helps detect nasty viruses!
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Recommended format for your email subject lines:
Model # [Model Letters] Year Subject
Examples:
505 88 V6 Mileage
405 Mi16 89 Ignition Coil source?
To unsubscribe from this list send a blank email message to PEUGEOT-L-UNSUBSCRIBE@EGROUPS.COM
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/peugeot-L/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
peugeot-L-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Received on Sat Feb 4 00:16:14 2006
