Why couldn’t Saab make cars as cool as its concepts?

This is the Saab 9X concept, which was unveiled at the Frankfurt motor show in September 2001. It broke the mould, according to the press release of the time, which is bad, because how can you build a second car if you don’t have a mould?

The mood board in the design studio apparently consisted only of Smart Roadsters, but the 9X was described by its creators as a “four-dimensional car that defies convention”. What it did was boldly upset the applecart that contained the usual way of doing things and incorporated styling cues from coupes, roadsters, estates and pickup trucks in one car. Phew. We almost can’t handle this much rebellion in one car, it’s too wild. 

Well, in the coupe format the car was fairly standard – 2+2 seating, windows, the usual. The roof panels came off targa-style to create a roadster of sorts, while you could flip down the rear seats and pretend it was an estate car, or open up the tailgate for a pickup truck effect. It wasn’t quite as exciting as it sounded on paper. 

Apart from trying to shoehorn four different types of car into one and failing? Well, there was the keyless ignition system, which was a big deal 20 years ago, and the fibre optic headlights, which don’t seem to have caught on. 

It was powered by a fancy aluminium turbocharged 3.0-litre V6 engine, producing 300bhp that was sent to the road through all four wheels. The transmission was a six-speed manual (the purist’s choice) and the 9X rode on what would now be considered rather titchy little 19-inch wheels. 

German car designer Michael Mauer was in charge of the Saab crayon set. “The Saab 9X shows that the traditional way of classifying products is dead,” is what he had to say at the time about the 9X concept. He is now head of design at Porsche, where he has overseen production of further cars that have defied traditional classification, such as the Cayenne and the Panamera. 

“It is also a signpost to the future – it shows where Saab is going.” Michael Mauer again. Unfortunately it didn’t exactly show where Saab was going, because it wasn’t a lightly retouched Chevrolet Trailblazer sitting in a scrapyard. It showed where Saab could have gone, if General Motors hadn’t made a grand mess of running the company and it went through two more owners before hitting the wall in 2010. The tragic reality of the Saab 9X concept is that it looked forward to a future in which the company wouldn’t exist. Now pop that in a concept car…

In retrospect, it’s clear that Saab was following the patented ‘Rover’ method of slow managed decline, with no money available other than to mess around with the headlights of existing production cars. General Motors had owned the company since 1989, but not done a great deal with it. Bear in mind that GM also owned Vauxhall/Opel, which posted consistent losses for almost 20 years, before returning to profit in its first year of Peugeot ownership. In 2010 GM sold Saab to Dutch sportscar firm Spyker, which held on for two years of juggling shaky finances, before the company assets were sold to a Chinese consortium that spent another two years not building anything and Saab disappeared completely in 2014. Sad times.