Saab Automobile

~ the eulogy ~

Svenska Aeroplan AB was founded in 1937 to build military aircraft for a country that intended to stay out of the next war. In 1945 the same engineers, with the war over and the order book thinning, were told to design a small car. Project 92 was handed to a team of sixteen under Gunnar Ljungström, none of whom had designed an automobile before and only two of whom held a driving license. That is most of the reason the Saab 92 that reached production in 1949 has a drag coefficient of 0.30 at a time when almost nothing else on a road was under 0.45: they treated it as a fuselage problem because a fuselage problem was what they knew.

The company kept behaving like an aerodynamics department for the next forty years. Front-wheel drive from the beginning. Two-stroke engines until 1967, long after everyone else had given up on them. The ignition key between the seats. Headlamp wipers as standard in a country where the road salt blinds you by December. Heated seats in 1971, which nobody in Michigan had thought to offer. The 99 arrived in 1968 and the 900 grew out of it in 1978, and both of them looked like nothing else because they were dimensioned around the driver's sightlines rather than around a styling brief.

The turbo is the part that escaped Sweden. The Saab 99 Turbo of 1977 was not the first turbocharged production car, but it was the first one built on the premise that a small boosted engine should be a sensible way to move a family rather than an exotic way to move a millionaire. Everything on the road now with a 1.5 liter turbo under the hood and five seats behind it is working from that argument. Saab made it thirty years before the rest of the industry was forced to accept it by emissions law.

General Motors bought half the company in 1989 and the rest in 2000. What it wanted was a European premium badge to set against BMW and Audi, and what it did was put Saab badges on shared architectures. The 9-5 and the second-generation 9-3 rode on GM platforms. The 9-2X was a rebadged Subaru Impreza and the 9-7X was a rebadged Chevrolet TrailBlazer, and the Swedish press called them the Saabaru and the Trollblazer without much affection. The best year in the company's history was 2007, at 125,397 cars, and it still lost money.

When GM went into Chapter 11 in 2009 it put Saab up for sale. Koenigsegg looked and walked. Spyker Cars, a Dutch maker of very expensive and very few sports cars, completed the purchase on 23 February 2010. Spyker had no money to speak of and Saab needed several hundred million euros a year, so the arithmetic was never going to work, and by the spring of 2011 the Trollhättan line had stopped because the suppliers would not ship without being paid.

~ the dossier ~

~ the veto ~

Victor Muller spent most of 2011 finding Chinese buyers. Pang Da and Youngman between them were willing to put real cash in, and each successive structure came back to the same wall. General Motors still owned the licenses under the 9-4X and the 9-5 and still built the engines, and it would not consent to any deal that handed that technology to a Chinese automaker. GM said so publicly in November. The bankruptcy filing went in on 19 December 2011 and around 3,300 people lost their jobs. About 2,000 of them lived in Trollhättan, which is 8.4 percent of everyone employed in the municipality, and the month after the plant closed the town's unemployment rate hit 21 percent, the worst of any of Sweden's 290 municipalities.

~ the name and the griffin ~

National Electric Vehicle Sweden bought the bankruptcy estate on 13 June 2012 with Chinese and Japanese money behind it. A small line restarted in Trollhättan and built a handful of 9-3s, and it never got much further than that. The Saab name was never part of the purchase in the way NEVS needed it to be: the trademark belongs to Saab AB, the defense company, and the griffin head belongs to Scania, and in the summer of 2014 the licensing arrangement lapsed. NEVS cars stopped being Saabs and started being NEVS.

So the brand died twice, and the second death is the stranger one. The factory was running, the tooling was intact, cars were coming off the line, and the badge on the hood was the part that could not be obtained. An aerospace firm and a truck maker held the two halves of the emblem and neither had any reason to hand them to a startup that might devalue them.

~ the platform that went to ankara ~

In October 2015 TÜBİTAK, the Turkish scientific and technological research council, licensed the Saab 9-3 intellectual property from NEVS for around 40 million euros after six months of negotiation. The purpose was Turkey's national car, a project that had been talked about since the Devrim prototypes of 1961 and had never produced anything that reached a showroom. The plan attached to the license required a minimum of 85 percent local content and further development inside Turkey.

Fikri Işık, then the minister for science, industry and technology, put the limit of the deal plainly: the rights to the 9-3 had been bought, the name had not. "The brand of the car will be a Turkish brand; it will not be Saab." The prototypes that were finally unveiled at the end of 2019 carried a Turkish badge, as promised, and by then had been through enough redesign that how much Trollhättan remained in them is a question nobody in Ankara has much interest in answering. A dead Swedish sedan spent four years as the starting geometry for somebody else's national project, which is a longer afterlife than most cars get.

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