In part one of our tour around the back-end of the Saab Museum, I showed you a whole bunch of cars that they've got there, but don't generally have on display in the main museum area.
Now I'd like to show you around another area out the back, one in which I didn't get to spend nearly enough time in. In fact, a Saab enthusiast could spend a week and barely cover a quarter of what's out here. I'm talking, of course, about the museum's archives.
Dave and I were there for only around an hour and that was after spending the previous 5 or 6 hours either looking over or driving some of the Saab Museum's own display vehicles. Needless to say, our minds were already spinning!
This is just a quick look around - about a dozen photos - of the still beating heart of Saab's History.
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This is common view in the archive: heaps of compacted shelving that hold all manner of Saab information. There's manuals for everything, advertising materials, even Saab Club magazines from various parts of the world.
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And a few looks inside some of those compacted units:
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There are also a whole heap of file drawers for flat storage of various sketches, technical drawings, original artwork and etc.
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The museum has a whole bunch of classic and rare Saab photography, too. Much of it is of the old competition days and of course, I was drawn to the Saab 99 images (and this was before I'd bought the 99T!)
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All of you collectors out there might want to study these boards to see what badges you might be missing :-)
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Unfortunately this one was partially obscured by some old TV monitors. Best I could do....
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And finally, one of my favourite areas - scale models of all sorts of Saab models and concept models over the years. I'll get the original photos and try and enlarge each one individually. To be posted soon.
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Again, my thanks must go to Peter Backstrom at the Saab Museum for the access he allowed us and the things we were able to see there.
It was the Saab day of a lifetime!
These photos are viewable as an album on Picasa.
Asher from El Paso, Texas
Fantastic and fascinating … all those sketches and lovely models and badges and things are an enthusiast's dream come true. One can feel the smell of a great era …
If I was allowed to, I would join you for weeks … and forget the whole world outside …
some very avanti-like front ends on one of those shelves. Is that some sort of saab boat next to them? (I think I see wheel wells, but it looks like it has a hull...)
fun stuff!
You get the impression that Lance Cole and Anders Tunberg's books only scratch the surface about the development of various models....
I look forward to seeing the photos...
NEW SAAB is not retro, but with an online_presentation of this great aera they could always communicate the line from past to present to future.
Swade, you should tell them.
To me it looks like a different front theme for the 99. This would have been a thousand years ahead of the "normal" '70s car design, and today a milestone in car design.
They really should open a "SAAB Design history" section in the SAAB Museum with all those prototypes.
Makes me wonder, what happened or will happen to the Saab cars that got moved into the GM Heritage Collection? Did Bob Lutz take them across town and sell them for scrap one weekend this past summer to fund extra Art-n-Science cupholders for a Cadillac?