No love for the SLAAB.

 

So, making jets doesn't mean dick if you want to make cars?

 

It took 4 cars for me to love a car as much as my 900 Turbo.

Saab hasn't been the same since they moved the ignition out of the center. Remember -- the 900 body style was like the S2000, 1979-1986 had the square headlights and 1987-1994 had the updated headlights and 3rd brake light. Any car who barely receives an update for 15 years but continues selling is impressive.

 

Nope.
Have a look at their product range.

Can't understand how hard it is not to have a PLAN. You can't survive on a limited product offering.
Some people will miss them. Most won't.

 

SAAB the car company and SAAB the aircraft company got a divorce a long time ago. They might be as far back as Rolls Royce the car company and Rolls Royce the heavy industry company that still makes jet engines (and was a former employer of mine).

I won't miss the 9-3 or 9-5. I will miss the 900 (and the NG900/ 9-3) and the 9000. I think it was a mistake to drop the hatchback as it was something they had and Audi et al didn't.

 

Not even the Sonett? Everybody likes the look of a Sonett.

 

Well, yes Saab was no world burner when GM bought them but in my mind what GM did with the brand was akin to buying a puppy and never feeding it. Why bother buying the puppy in the first place?

Precisely! Neglect....or incompetence, take your pick. If you don't have a plan for the Saab brand in either the context of your existing portfolio of brands or the overall market, why own the brand? Ford was guilty of the same exact stupidity at the same point in time. I guess it was fashionable to buy up teetering European marques on the cheap. Sort of like Paris Hilton shopping for jewelry.

Exactly! There was no vision for Saab within GM so they defaulted to what they knew, badge engineering, Detroit style. Customers didn't want a Chevy SUV with a Saab grille. At that point, Saab had no reason to exist. If they didn't have a vision for the brand and enough faith to invest the necessary capital to develop uniquely Saab product, they should have stayed away and focused the capital where they did have a vision. Instead, they added Saab to Chevy, Pontiac, GMC, Cadillac, Saturn, Oldsmobile, Hummer, and Buick. Nine brands! Nine! WTF? Of course more than half of them failed.

I agree completely here. And one of the ways they should have been "fixing" GM was by shedding brands rather than buying up more brands without any idea how to integrate it into an already bloated product portfolio. And I agree that GM helped Saab clean up their manufacturing and supply chain processes. But that meant Saab was now able to meet the minimum acceptable standards for sale of product in a competitive marketplace. Aiming for minimum standards never set any sales records. At the end of the day, the cars were decent quality badge engineered knockoffs of GM platforms. Yawn.

No, GM murdered Saab.....in the boardroom.....with a candlestick. No vision, no plan, no investment, no future. RIP Saab!

 

ive never driven one, but have 900hrs in a SAAB airplane, not surprised their cars arent appealing

 

Close but for the fact that they did feed SAAB with lots of cash but didn't help them do anything good with that cash.

Not exactly. SAAB was platform sharing, nothing close to the badge engineering GM was doing at the time. It was also something that started pre-GM. The 9000 was a shared platform with two other brands (I don't want to misquote which so I won't). The doors were identical on all three. That was something that didn't happen with the SAAB engineered cars based on GM platforms. SAAB didn't share engines with other GM cars until the 2003 introduction of the current 9-3. Even then the engines were part of the same family but were significantly different. I think SAAB was the only GM turbo I4 in 2003 and likely until the turbo Cobalt and sibs came out. The NG900 and the 9-5 were based on GM platforms but that would be like calling the original RAV4 a rebadge of the '87-'91 Camry. Same platform but not at all the same car.

The only true rebadges were the late in the game 9-7 and 9-2. Rumors of the time suggested that SAAB and GM knew that new product was needed but the product cycles weren't lining up. GM needed to shuffle their plans which often left SAAB hanging out. It wasn't worth it to change GM's plans to fit SAABs needs thus SAAB was starved of platforms on which to make new cars. At the same time SAAB sales weren't high enough to justify changing plans to accommodate them.

You are totally right about the too many brands part. I have no idea what GM was thinking there. Decades ago the extra brands did make sense. Though I hated to see any of the historic brands die, the fact is, anymore I think 2-3 brands per manufacture is about all that makes sense. VW is getting away with it because most of their extra brands are premium vs mass market. Even then it may not work out in the end.

Back to SAAB, I think in the beginning GM took the attitude that SAAB would be fine if just given resources (which GM had at the time). So GM gave SAAB money and said do good. When it was clear that SAAB needed more than just money it came at a time when GM was putting lots of effort into fixing it's own house in Michigan. It was clear SAAB needed more than just money around 2000 or so. However, even though many people on this forum don't realize it, it was around that time that GM was making the initial changes that resulted in the MUCH better GM cars we see today. It was during this time that GM was shedding workers (with buyouts), and a corporate structure that was fundamentally flawed. GM simply didn't have the time or resources to help SAAB.

Again I disagree. GM took a patient that needed lots of help, while the patient insisted he just needed some cash, offered cash only to later find that the patient really was sick. GM simply wasn't the doctor with the skills for the job. I'm not sure if another company would have been. It's quite possible the only way SAAB could have survived is like Skoda. Skodas are now rebadged VWs in the worst sense of Detroit rebadging. Simply changing logos.
We would all be bashing GM if SAABs were nothing more rebadges of otherwise good cars. But what did SAAB have to stand on? The original 900 was popular for a few reasons. It was relatively powerful and efficient. That turbo 4 moved out smartly compared to most cars of the time. It also was good in the snow (FWD and all that jazz). The cars were big and offered good value compared to other Euro makes. MB offered big cars but they were very pricy. BMW was the same but not as luxurious. Audi was a bit player at the time. Volvo was conservative and safe but not fun. The domestic luxury brands were about isolation and were generally large cars. SAAB offered sporty, safe and very practical with good interior space and that hatchback. They of course were also unique. And all of this was offered for entry level luxury prices. But when the 90s started the Japanese were offering relatively sporty, entry level luxury (but not hatchbacks) cars that weren't small. By the late 90s BMW and Mercedes had dropped their prices and Audi had the brilliant and well priced B5 based cars. The market was much more competitive and SAAB hadn't kept up. Really, I think we can look at it as what was GM thinking, not GM killed them. I suspect, short of basically making them a Buick like clone brand, there was little that could be done to save SAAB short of absolute brilliance. GM didn't have that brilliance but I doubt many others did either. Again, I think it's more the case that SAAB had a terminal illness and GM simply wasn't able to perform the miracle that would have been needed to fix the company.

 

The two are unrelated.