People still rave about Saab years after they left for good. Sometimes, making the best car possible isn't enough to stick around
Jeremy Clarkson once said something to the tune of "Lawyers drive Audis, Aristocrats like Ferraris, but quirky and interesting people like to drive Saabs". Some people still, even almost a decade later, won't forgive General Motors for what they see as destroying the much-adored brand for their own personal profit. Many of us at HotCars.com still mourn the death of Sweden's second, and many would say, superior car maker. Just looking at the final Saab model, the 9-5 aero with a minimally trained eye, one can see the 40 plus years of heritage that inspires its design.
It's that heritage that we're celebrating here today as we look at some of Saab's greatest hits.
The Saab 93 Was The First Saab To Sell In America
The Saab 93 was the first car Saab ever sold in America in 1957, and it's not hard to spot design ques that eventually made it all the way to the brand's final model almost 60 years later.
The large, swooping front grill maintained a presence on all Saab models, morphing and changing shape with each new car, but still quintessentially Saab. The swooping rear decklid and trunk clearly made its way in some form all the way to the 9-5 aero.
The 93's 750 cc three-cylinder two-stroke engine was absolutely puny, but it's featherweight body and short wheelbase also meant that it was agile. So much in fact that the 93 was quite popular in motorsports, competing at famous races such as the 24 hours of LeMans, the Italian Mille Miglia, and rally races all across Europe.
If the 93 wasn't sporty enough, there was also the exquisitely gorgeous looking mark two Saab Sonett. Just as later Saab models would compete to make an exciting and quirky alternative to big German executive sedans, the fiber-glass bodied Sonnet was a viable competitor to leaky old English sports cars which, while fast and exciting, couldn't match the reliability of Sonnett, which used the same basic three-cylinder engine from the 93 yet still held it's head high as a proper race car for the road.
Saab Introduces The Turbo
In 1978, Saab introduced a profound shift in engineering, promising to include a turbocharged engine option on all forthcoming models. This gave rise to an upgraded version of the 99, appropriately called the 99 turbo.
This was the predecessor to what would become Saab's most popular model, the 900. The 900 completely broke with approved norms of what the average daily driver should be capable of. With a sleeker, more redesigned body than the 99 turbo, improved steering, and suspension, the 900 offered the best bang for your dollar driver's car on sale at the time. Saab automobile's parent company may have been well known for producing many of the Swedish Air Force's best fighter jets, but the 900 was a jet for the street that almost anyone could afford. This was also the introduction of the Aero division.
Don't think that Aero was just the Saab equivalent of AMG or M Division. The people at Saab were far too intelligent to do something like that. Aero wasn't a brand for people who care about showing off; it had no use for 20-inch rims or a ride so firm that it shatters bones just stepping inside. Unlike any German car with a fake M or AMG badge slapped on it, Saab engineers designed Aero models to be as unassuming as possible, with minimal exterior indicators that what lies underneath is a poised and capable driver's car. This ensured any Aero driver could cruise any continent in fast, quiet anonymity without being gawked at for driving something smug.
Not only was the 900 fast, nimble, and a great bargain, it's introduction also marks when Saab gained a reputation for being some of the safest cars in the world. The end result shouldn't then be any shock, as the 900 became by far the best-selling car in the company's history. Soon after the 900's launch, 50 percent of the company was sold to General Motors, and we'd seldomly see a Saab that excited quite as much ever again.
One glaring exception to this rule was the 9-3 Viggen aero. The Viggen, which is Swedish for thunderbolt, borrows its name from the J-37, a single-seat fighter aircraft produced by Saab's aerospace division. The 9-3 had a 2.3-liter turbo four-cylinder engine that put out a robust 230 horsepower and a scarcely believable 250 pounds of torque at 20 pounds of turbo boost. The 9-3 Viggen showcased that even under the thumb of GM bureaucracy, Saab was capable of completely ignoring orders from higher-ups when they demanded boring rebadges of Opels and Chevrolets. Saab, instead, made a phenomenal front-wheel drive competitor to the BMW M3.
Saaburu: 9-2x Aero
Needed more proof not everything from the badge-engineering GM-Saab merger was awful? Feast your eyes on the 9-2x Aero. Think it looks like a Subaru WRX? That's because it basically is. Affectionately called the Saaburu, all the body panels from the A-pillars forward and the rear hatch lid are redesigned, but everything else on the 9-2x was Subaru parts. Rather than design a new platform for the Saab brand, GM licensed Subaru to make 9-2, and if you think the regular WRX is a blast to drive, the 9-2 is all of that wrapped in an extra layer of refinement; many people think it looks better as well.
We'd be wrong to not give a little shout out to the Saab 9-7 Aero. It's a Saab Branded SUV with a 6.0-liter LS2 V8 from a Corvette. Need I say more?
It's been almost ten years since Saab pulled out of the North American market and over six since it closed down for good. Looking back on it's a surprisingly extensive catalog of iconic cars, it's safe to say that the thing that made Saab so special is that they dared to be better than the status quo. Even when bureaucrats and accounts repeatedly told them to intentionally make their cars worse to pad the bottom line, Saab still had the stones to fight back for what they believed in; that in itself makes Saab legendary. If only it had stuck around.