Saab Bankruptcy: Long Before the Fall, Innovations Aplenty

1947 Saab prototype.

By PHIL PATTON
Barring an unforeseen rescue, Saab‘s long, strange trip through Swedish courts and Chinese office towers appears to be over.

As reported in The Times on Monday, the automaker’s attempts to work out a deal with a Chinese company ran aground on the refusal of General Motors, its former owner, to allow critical technology licenses to be transferred. G.M. retained a veto over the deal through key stock ownership and it did not want some of the technologies to surface as potential competition to its joint venture in China with the S.A.I.C. Motor Corporation.


Apropos of the season, over a figurative warm mug of glogg, Wheels is recollecting th e company that popularized seat heaters, just one of many innovations that were personal and practical in a way that came to distinguish the company’s approach to building cars.


Saab was established in the late 1940s as the offspring of a Swedish aviation company. Its name is an acronym for Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, or Swedish Airplane Company, founded in 1937 to build aircraft for the Swedish Air Force, a job that Saab AB, the aeronautics and defense company, continues to do.


The first Saab bodies were strikingly literal renditions of the aerodynamic wisdom of the day. Beginning with the 92, the cars were the work of Sixten Sason, a Swedish industrial designer born in 1912 who also drafted Hasselblad cameras, Electrolux vaccuum cleaners and Husqvarna tools. Sason’s last model, the 99 of 1969, introduced pioneering design features like a wrap-around windshield and hatchback.


With the 900 convertible, the company helped resuscitate the drop top after much of the car industry had given up on it. Saab helped popularize the use of disc brakes and famously positioned the ignition away from the steering column, at the level of the gearshift.


Saabs was also notorious for their electrical problems and the inevitable joke, “They named it Saab because that’s what you do when you see the repair bill.”


But more than any other, one Saab innovation has exerted outsize influence on the industry. That is the company’s establishment of the small-displacement turbocharged engine as the way to resolve the conflicting desires for fuel economy and available torque. Ford’s EcoBoost engines and G.M.’s 2-liter units are just the latest proof of the idea’s salience.


Saab was always the offbeat choice. “Made by trolls in Trollhattan” read the bumper stickers of proud Saab owners, referencing the Swedish city in which most Saabs were produced.


The first Saab sold in the United States was brought over in 1956 by an import agent, Ralph Millet, whose challenge was to identify dealers eager to sell an odd-looking car with a two-stroke, 3-cylinder engine. But Saab outlasted French and Italian automakers like Peugeot and Fiat in the American market.


Saab has always had a tweedy, academic reputation. Kurt Vonnegut, the novelist and essayist, managed a Saab dealership on Cape Cod. In his book “A Man Without a Country,” he quipped that the experience negatively impacted his writing career. “I believe my failure as a dealer so long ago explains what would otherwise remain a deep mystery: why the Swedes have never given me a Nobel Prize for literature,” he wrote.


As a branch of General Motors, Saab put its own griffin-head badges on a Subaru Impreza (the 9-2X) and a reworked Chevrolet TrailBlazer (the 9-7X).


Saab’s plans for the future were embodied in two famous concepts. The Aero X design study, inspired by Saab’s “born from jets” marketing message, reflected the influence of aeronautics. Anthony Lo, the chief designer, said that the concept, which never entered production or otherwise greatly influenced design at the company, was inspired by the Gripen jet fighter, a joint venture of Saab and BAE Systems, sold around the world.


More recently, the PhoeniX concept and sketches for a future 9-3 by the young star designer, Jason Castriota, raised hopes that the brand would make bold statements again. Mr. Castriota described the shape as having been inspired by the earliest Saabs, the so-called Ur Saab of Sason, distinguished by its teardrop shape and canopy. Protruding shapes at the C-pillars swept backward as flying buttresses, or winglets, in a ribbon effect — a striking, romantic and perhaps last gesture, it turns out.

NEW YORK TIMES

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