New Now Know How

Word comes from my friend Simon that there’s going to be a Save Saab Convoy next Sunday. It comes with the offer to cruise around in Simon’s quite lovely 1978 Saab 99 Turbo, so naturally I’m in.

Unlike some cities around the world, there’s no GM headquarters to drive to, in a show of numbers, or even a Saab office to visit in solidarity. Instead, we’re meeting at Ikea (coz it’s Swedish, natch) and cruising to a local picnic spot. The convoy will have no impact on GM’s impending decision on what they’ll do with Saab.

So why do it? Firebirdman said it best:

It may seem a small and inconsequential and even pathetic thing, but I think it’s important that when the history books are written, the record will reflect that somebody—anybody—was there to say bullshit. This is wrong. We bear witness.

(previously)

The values that Saab enthusaists love don’t grab you by the throat. They’re a slow burn and you warm to them as you develop a relationship with the car. The weird dash, the lumpen seats, the strangely upright pillars all combined to have a weirdly sexless showroom appeal (or lack of). Of course, all of those things grow on you. The ergonomics that mean everything falls to hand so readily, the seats that see you through a multi-hour trip and the visibility that is, especially in most everything else after about 2005, in ever-decreasing supply as pillars are inclined towards the horizontal and glass area is diminished. (It doesn’t help that the ride in the recent cars was crashy and soft at the same time, a criticism currently leveled at Hyundai, make of that what you will.) But who was going to drop a great deal of money on a car that didn’t immediately make you feel great? No one.

That’s the problem with Saab. They stopped being appealing to ordinary people. Or perhaps ordinary people started wanting something Saab wasn’t offering. Saab couldn’t convince people that they didn’t actually want the Ultimate Driving Machine or Vorsprung Durch Technik and what they really wanted was the Unnervingly Practical Car That You’ll Come to Love For Its Intangible Qualities.

In the late 90s, when the Japanese brands were returning from their luxury-car follies they could fall back on the roots. Mazda could lick its wounds by making money on 323s and Toyota could build a better toaster but Saab didn’t have a bread-and-butter range to fall back on. The 900 came and went and the 9000, on a shared platform developed with the Fiat group, managed by some small miracle to be Saab enough to please the faithful and tempt outsiders. But when, on GM’s watch, and let’s be honest, even before, the world was changing around Saab, Saab couldn’t change with the world and couldn’t make the world see them anew. They couldn’t make their cars more Saab-y because it was the Saab-ish-ness that ordinary people didn’t respond to. But making their car’s less Saab-y was an even worse idea.

And now, what is to be done? If someone buys Saab, they’ll be stuck with the current 9-3, the new but not class-leading 9-5 and the reputation of a failed brand to overcome. Remember MG Rover? Didn’t they do well with the good but sort of old-fashioned Rover 75 and MG ZT and the nice but not quite as good as the MX-5 MGF? Oh, yeah. Damn.