18 December 2009 - 15:00
Saab is dead
GM has announced it is killing Saab. The historic Swedish car maker has been up for sale for most of 2009, and no buyer has stepped up. GM is enormously vulnerable financially, having just come out of bankruptcy. It can’t afford to prop up the loss-making Saab any longer.
Saab isn’t going down in flames: the wind-up, says GM, will be ‘orderly’. In other words, Vauxhall dealers will honour warranties, and Saab workers and suppliers will get paid.
But 3400 Saab people will lose their jobs, and there are 1100 Saab dealerships around the world which will also mean job losses there.
When Saab was first put up for sale, tiny Swedish supercar maker Koenigsegg made up a financial consortium to buy the company. But at the last minute it pulled out.
Then tiny Dutch supercar company Spyker did the same (see a pattern here?). But it has been unable to overcome ‘due diligence issues’. Hmmmm: Spyker has never made real money. And it wasn’t a success at F1. Nor at Le Mans. To buy Saab looked like wildly over-reaching itself, frankly.
Meanwhile the Chinese firm BAIC has bought the rights to make the old Saab 9-5 in China, plus certain technologies from the 9-3. But it doesn’t have the Saab name.
Saab is a proud carmaker. Its history is of safe, practical big cars with muscly turbo engines. They were interesting and eccentric and occasionally rather good. But when GM bought Saab to try and have a premium brand (similar to Ford buying Jaguar), GM didn’t really know what to do with it. It lost money continuously.
GM has been trying to simplify itself in the past year. It nearly sold Opel-Vauxhall (which would have meant a catastrophic loss of engineering expertise). It closed down Saturn and Pontiac. It sold Hummer to another Chinese company. And now Saab is toast.
What’s ironic is that Saab had some good new GM-based cars coming: the attractive new 9-5 was about to go into production and towards the end of the year a new 9-4X crossover was due to be launched, based on the impressive new Cadillac SRX. Now they’ll never see the light of day. Unless some other car maker wants to buy the rights on them. GM says it’s open to offers, but that seems unlikely.
Paul Horrell
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Surely GM must have other assets that are losing them more money than Saab is. Then again, I guess they've survived this long ploughing millions of dollars into muscle car development so that a few thousand people can buy them makes sense in somebody's world.
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As i said before,Saab-Scannia does not deserve this.One of the best turbo engine makers of the world can not be closed down,now that it has this new models coming out and the "bio-ethanol" running engines already on the roads...well, i can`t do nothing about it but what about the swedish gov? and do you know what is gonna happen with aircraft?
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Saab is dead. Good.
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It was vaguely inevitable but it will be sad to see SAAB go. They have, after all, produced some decent cars over the years, maybe not "great" but decent all the same; 93 Turbo, 99 Turbo 900 Turbo, 9000 Turbo, all Turbo powered, but Turbocharging saloons seemed to be SAAB's trademark. Then there was the 9-3 Viggen, oh no wait, that car deserves the "worst understeering car ever" award, still it's infamous right?
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dadoji: Im not sure, but im reasonably confident in saying that Saab cars and Saab aerospace are different things now. So Saab Aerospace will continue to operate
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Yep Saab Aero is completely seperate as I understand. (and make some really cool looking jets over the years) -> shame that didn't translate to the cars, along with the names like Viggen and Draken.
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When it comes to selling cars, turbo'd engines and screaming performance have little influence over the average driver's decision (TG viewers/readers are not average, so don't even go there). It is the image of oneself in the car that makes the sale, and the picture above doesn't match my vision of Saab. I think the fugliness of the 1980's Saabs still reside in most driver's consciousness. Just the idea of a Saab makes me wonder 'WTF' were they thinking? Why the styling above wasn't more heavily promoted is a mystery. Granted, it doesn't make me drool like a Jag or Ferrari, but it also doesn't make me want to run away. The death of Saab may have been written by the designers in 1982.
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@dadoji: Saab AB (aerospace and defense) and Saab Automobile was separated years ago. Saab AB is actually doing pretty well.
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A pity thats for sure, GM has sure been completely incompetent the past decade.
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A big middle finger to GM. They ruined Saab, by forcing them to make Vectras a'la Saab. The old proper Saabs were, and are, really nice cars. I love the look of them aswell, especially the turbos.
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I guess Saab is like football, then - at least in Brazil. It is everybody's second club, but nobody buys its stuff... I liked them, though!
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GM ruined SAAB,in the 80s SAAB's were built better than the GERMAN cars ,they easily done 250,000 mls. FIAT should buy them, and let SAAB build and design the cars,just like before GM took over.after all they have worked together before ALFA164/SAAB 9000/LANCIA THEMA.FIAT CROMA.
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infact i would like to see BMW go bust
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infact i would like to see BMW go bust
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sad this i liked the look of the new saabs... id by them if i wasn't a boy that is in debt to his dad!!!!!!!!!!
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sad this i liked the look of the new saabs... id by them if i wasn't a boy that is in debt to his dad!!!!!!!!!!
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sad this i liked the look of the new saabs... id by them if i wasn't a boy that is in debt to his dad!!!!!!!!!!
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sad this i liked the look of the new saabs... id by them if i wasn't a boy that is in debt to his dad!!!!!!!!!!
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sad this i liked the look of the new saabs... id by them if i wasn't a boy that is in debt to his dad!!!!!!!!!!
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I worked for SAAB half my life, for 25 years and I Love SAAB. This is one of the worst days in my life?. :0(
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Truly a sad day. . These were characterful cars even after GM got their hands on them and did their best to ruin them, Racing pedigree, innovative turbos and cutting edge safety features in their day. Come on TG, launch a campaign to save Saab if the Swedish govenment is too dim witted to act !
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@dontpanicblink: It happened that an early project on what was supposed to be the next 9-5 was a combined Alfa/SAAB one, but SAAB stepped out of it 'cause of its crisis, leaving Alfa alone... which is why the big Alfa new 166 is very late. The fiat buys saab scenario was an early plan involving the OPEL buyoff... something like GM saying "I let you buy OPEL, but in exchange you get SAAB as well". Then Magna and the German Gov and GM kind-of-f****d the situation up etc. etc. and FIAT concentrated on the Aussie-US plan about Chrysler-Alfa with BMW as a partner. Pity, so long. There're still too many car factories around, even if brands could be more. It means that brands with one or two plants are in deep trouble. While FIAT just zeroed the old Milan Alfa factory, while the production will still be going.
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Some say Saab is innovative. Some say Saab is to good to be put asleep. Yea yea ... Volvo makes cars people buy. Toyota, Mazda, Mercedes, Kia and a lot of others do the same. Even Koenigsegg makes cars people buy. Saab don't and haven't done in years. How can anyone be surprised that GM kills it? Lada and Trabant was cars that never made a profit. But they where made in USSR and in DDR. They didn't have to make a profit... Saab is out of date. It's about time to flush it... ...says MrBaltazar
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Very very very very very sad news.
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1deano1 commented on this article
18 December 2009
Can't say I didn't see this coming...
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