Re*Move

Goodbye SAAB

We're not going to act like it is a surprise, but we're still shedding a tear or two this afternoon after confirmation from GM that it is to shut its Swedish sub-division SAAB. After years of new product starvation and the collapse of talks with Koenigsegg and now Spyker, the brand from Trollhattan - beloved of sensible professionals the land over - will shortly close its doors.

The death of SAAB saddens me in a way that - I'm sorry to say - the demise of MG Rover didn't. I can't entirely put my finger on why, but perhaps it's a personal thing. My piano tutor throughout my formative years had a fabulous green 900 that I regularly used to ride in. I've known many architects who drove, and raved about, SAABs. Sarah's dad used to have a 9000 as a company car, and her mum runs a current generation 9-3 convertible, which to me is much cooler than its competitors from BMW, Audi or Merc, even if by any objective measure it's somehow 'less good'.

How it's come to this is well documented, and not worth raking over again - but what happened is a good example of why mergers and takeovers can be a bad thing. Prior to GM's investment, SAAB made sub-cool, idiosyncratic cars, which while rarely regarded as class leaders, were at least different. The aforementioned 900 run by my piano teach was bought in 1990 - largely thanks to it having a vast boot, needed for transporting her husband's paintings across Europe to their native Hungary for exhibitions. Back then - to the 9 year old me - a car whose ignition barrel was on the transmission tunnel, which wouldn't let you turn the car off unless you locked it in reverse, and which had a turbo boost gauge, was the height of excitement. 

A real SAAB - in Detroit. Oh the irony.

It's testament to what SAABs were then that she still drives that very car to this day, and that as far as I know it's still running as sweet as a nut. Its qualities - safety, solidity, spaciousness, ergonomic intelligence and an image that was resolutely different to BMW, Mercedes or Volvo, was what attracted so many of the professional classes to the brand. Nice, smart people - doctors, architects and teachers, drove SAABs. In my view, it's to GM's eternal shame that they couldn't capitalise on this. They kept the looks, the funny ignition barrel and the good dashboard ergonomic, but started basing the cars on platforms that were far from in their first flushes of youth. The 90s 900 based on the 80s Vauxhall Cavalier/Opel Vectra being the classic example. That was fine for a while; the people who bought SAABs weren't bothered.

Yet the upper echelons of the car industry were changing, and GM starved SAAB of the ability to keep up. While GM were completely failing to get the appeal of SAAB to a predominantly European buyer, BMW and Mercedes were inventing and filling niches left right and centre, that were changing those buyer's perspectives. What they did was create demand among those very classes who once-upon-a-time had driven SAABs, for small premium hatches (1 series, A-class), SUVs (X5, X3, ML) and small lifestyle wagons (3, 5, C, E, A4, A6). Worse still for SAAB, while GM was dithering, Audi hauled itself out of VW's shadow, and turned itself into a premium brand that (until very recently) became what you bought if you wouldn't be seen dead in a Beemer or Merc. All the nice, design-aware people were suddenly driving Audis.

By the time GM admitted defeat, the 9-5, once the mainstay of SAAB's range, was 13 years old, and had acquired a pair of bizarre Dame-Edna Everage spectacles on its snout. Find another mainstream car in the industry that's anywhere near that age and I'll eat my hat. Its age alone sums up where GM went wrong. But there was so much more. The new 9-5 - reputedly signed off years ago, still isn't here - and probably never will be (at least as a SAAB). It was still running around Millbrook proving ground on final validation tests when I was there in September. A great shame, because even though the new 9-5 was unlikely to ever be a 5 series-beater, it was an impressive enough car, which priced right, might have hit its target quite well. Combine that with the fact that Anthony Lo and team in Russelsheim had knocked out some fantastic-looking, authentically SAAB-feeling concepts over the past few years, and one starts to think that had GM only had big enough balls and deep enough pockets, the story might have been very different.

In the cold light of day, SAAB clearly no longer stacks up. Sales are too low, and it's a European niche brand. The American's never really got it - certainly not well enough to own it - and GM needs to save money. So shutting SAAB is the only thing it can reasonably do now.

But stop for a minute and consider these things. The topic du jour in the car world (actually, with Copenhagen, just make that the world - full stop) is green issues. SAAB, thanks to its Swedish roots and early implementation of things like catalytic converters, has long been thought of as a green, clean brand. So when everyone else is busy inventing new faux green 'sub-brands', GM is busy killing a fully authentic one. Smart.

Continuing on the green theme, if we look to current and future gasoline engine technologies, today's talk is largely about turbo-charging. Ask anyone in the industry which company is synonymous with the word 'turbo charging', and I guarantee they'll give you one answer: SAAB. SAAB practically invented the technology, it has for years used it on its cars, and I think I'm right in saying every car it currently sells is turbo-charged. So just when you want to talk turbos, and how you’ve years of knowledge and history building them, you go and kill the world's most famous turbo-charged brand. Welcome to the world of GM.

Finally, design. In an era when people will pay - frankly - silly prices for an Arne Jacobson chair or table, and have more design ‘literacy’ than ever, Swedish design ought to be a major selling point. SAAB's design foundations, and design language feels apt for our times. Retrained, sophisticated, clean, pure, and non-showy. There's depth in SAAB's design too. The seats in SAAB's cars have long been regarded as some of the best in the industry, and to this day are still paragons of ergonomic comfort. Likewise the dashboard. Everything is ergonomically right, and falls to hand. And if you've ever been to a motorshow on press day, you'll usually find us folks from Car Design News down the SAAB stand, bathing in the cool white lighting and Swedish chairs, partaking in the best lunches and cappuccinos at the show. Cars like the Aero-X concept show that there are people working for SAAB/Opel who understand what good, Swedish, SAAB design is about too, and how it could be used as a selling point. And I haven’t even touched on safety. Yet now it’s all academic. 

The 9-X concept. Which people like me would have automatically bought ahead of the default Audi A3

In years to come, books will doubtless be written about bad management, which will use GM's handling of SAAB as case studies in how things shouldn't be done. Such thoughts make us sad, so we'd prefer to remember some happier things about SAAB. Stig Blomqvist flying through a rally stage in a SAAB 99 Turbo, the comedic torque-steering power of various Viggen models, the theatre of the Aero-X concept’s lifting cockpit canopy, and lazy summer afternoons, wind-in-the-hair in the back of a top-down 9-3 convertible. They might not have been perfect, but SAABs had this way of making you feel deeply secure, happy and content. In a world where so much is changing, and so much is uncertain, we still think there’s room for that kind of car. It's just a pity that GM never saw it. So goodbye SAAB, you will be missed.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 18th December 2009

Related reading: 

On Saab's Passing (by Ben Kraal, on his blog).

Report from Detroit: We Bear Witness (Firebird Man).

Images of Frankfurt

I spent just one day at the 2009 Frankfurt Auto Show and barely covered more than a couple of halls. But here's the stuff I saw that interested me. Click on the collage below or here.

Press day. Frankfurt Auto Show. 15 September 2009.

Posted by Mark Charmer. Mark is managing director of The Movement Design Bureau.

Knitting patterns: taking hybrid cars mainstream

Until recently, the typical hybrid buyer tended to be the sort of person you’d try to avoid sitting next to at dinner parties. Ok, perhaps that’s a bit mean, but one had to be fairly committed to the cause to go hybrid.

However, things are changing. A new Prius is here, which (whisper it) doesn’t drive like a mooing double bed on castors anymore. A couple of weeks back we reviewed Honda’s Insight, which can be had at a cheaper price than a hybrid’s ever been before. And then you can throw into the bargain the new Ford Fusion Hybrid - we’ve driven it, and it’s brilliant (unlike the Mercury Mariner Hybrid, which isn’t). Hybrid’s going mainstream.

Manufacturers are falling over themselves to ready hybrids – even once staunch opponents such as VW – because the technology is settling as one pattern by which America will go green. Europeans have long known diesel will deliver similar fuel economy benefits as a hybrid – but those on the other side of the pond still aren’t too sold on the idea. Before we embark on a Euro-bash of Americans and/or hybrids, there are fairly credible reasons for this. Diesel’s more expensive to buy in the US than in Europe – here, diesel’s been pushed (with tax breaks) – particularly by the French and Germans, so there’s now much more refinery capacity, for instance. And while diesel delivers better fuel economy (and hence lower CO2 emissions) than petrol, NOx and particulate matter from diesel exhausts are still problematic. They contribute to local respiratory diseases, and cost big money to reduce. Just ask Mercedes, BMW and VW who are adding expensive ‘ad-blue’ exhaust treatment systems to the cars they sell in North America, in order to pass the Tier II Bin 5 regs (don’t ask).

 In Europe, we've long believed diesel is the way to go - particularly when you need serious torque, in the world of SUVs and pick-ups.

What’s really significant is that Porsche and, yes, even Ferrari, will soon debut hybrids. Hybrid technology in performance-orientated cars is serious news. It’s easy to argue manufacturers who are about to get hit over the head (with heavy fines) by the EU over fleet emission have to go down this route, but that misses the point.

Firstly, it means that hybrid technologies can be seen to have benefits in a wide spectrum of automotive applications (not just ones primarily aimed at city-based, compact family vehicles bought by people who aren’t gear-heads). Secondly, it alludes to the notion that hybrid technology could actually enhance, rather than detract from the driving experience. The Prius and Insight are automotive cardboard. One doesn’t extract pleasure from piloting them down a challenging road. But if the technology is arriving in a Porsche and a Ferrari, then you can be sure that is about to change. ‘Fun’ and ‘hybrid’ will shortly be appearing in the same sentence, without being followed by guffaws.

This slow but steady greening of the automotive industry bears remarkable similarity to a previous automotive ‘trend’, which resulted in a complete attitudinal change in consumers back in the 1990s.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, only Volvos and Saabs were famed, and bought, for their safety. Of course, Mercedes had invented the airbag back in the 1970s - and it was appearing on top of the line S-classes in the late 1980s, but very little else. Then in 1993 Ford launched the European Mondeo – the first real mainstream affordable car with a driver’s airbag fitted as standard across the entire range. Except, in the UK, Vauxhall decided to beat Ford to it, literally by weeks, by doing the same in their updated Cavalier.

Once upon a time, only Volvo (above) and Saab were renowned for safety prowess.

By 1995, buying a new car that didn’t have a driver’s airbag was the exception rather than the norm. Then in 1997, Euro NCAP appeared. Suddenly, buyers knew which cars were ‘safe’ and which weren’t – and it was being thrust in their face. Safety became a selling point – which brands like Renault capitalised on. Come 2009, and it’s odd for any vehicle not to get 5 stars (the top crash rating) in a Euro NCAP test. Cars are much more crashworthy than the ones of twenty years ago. Consumers expect safety. They believe if they’re involved in a 40mph shunt, they’ll walk away. It took them a while, but it became the expected norm. Cars which flunked tests, suffered in the sales figures.

It sounds cynical, but I think that’s what you’ll see with hybrids, and green cars generally. Before long, it looks likely most new cars will include - at a basic level - something like stop-start technology. This is a big deal in itself, because emissions and wastage from idling cars in traffic is huge. But it’s looking like many vehicle will include some kind of hybridisation – regenerative braking, additional electric motors, a road-going version of F1’s KERS.

One day, will all vehicles wear this badge?

So what you might say? There are three main reasons this is important:

• It will cut emissions and raise fuel economy standards across the board.
• It means the fun to drive, performance-orientated car is far from dead.
• It conditions the market. Consumers, brought up for 100 years on a constantly running petrol or diesel motor, get used to the fact their car turns itself off at the lights, needs starting up in a different way, or doesn’t have a conventional gearbox. That’s good news – it leads us down a path of faster acceptance and uptake of new technology, and new forms of vehicles.

BMW's efficient dynamics campaign

The revolution is here now, and already being advertised. BMW calls it efficient dynamics. Audi’s just jumped on the bandwagon – and is calling it ‘recuperation’. Just as safety was the selling point of the 90s, judging by current adverts, hybrid, energy and green have now gone mainstream too. Before long, the consumer will expect – and likely demand - it.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 10th June 2009

Images: knitted jumper - janetmck on flickr, Touareg V10 TDi - Asurroca on flickr, crash XC90 - hollesdottir on flickr, BMW banner - BMW