SAABSUNITED

Lance Cole is a writer living in England and has penned several books on automobiles and aviation. Saab enthusiasts would know him best for the book Saab 99 and 900: The Complete Story, which is an excellent and essential volume and available for sale at the SU Bookshop.

Click here to read all of Lance’s previous contributions at Trollhattan Saab.

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Snowbound in a Saab

Lance Cole takes to the road for a blast into the past and a musing upon Saab’s fight to survive

The man that runs Saabs United – Mr Wade – cannot be getting much sleep lately. He is not alone, for any Saab enthusiast must feel tortured by the apparent bipolar antics of the Saab sale and its seller.

Contrary to perceived wisdom, not everything General Motors (GM) does or has done in its history is as silly as its current demeanour. Messrs Mitchell, Earl and Cole (not me!) were leaders in design, engineering and brand-ability. GM has made some great cars – under various names.

The American design iconography of GM usually gets all the plaudits. But GM’s Opel design bureau in Germany has turned out some fantastic cars under some talented design chiefs. Are you familiar with the Opel Manta mk1, the Lotus Carlton/Omega, the 1980s ‘aero-weapon’ designs of Gordon Brown? (And no, that’s not the UK’s Prime Minister but the brilliant GM head of design who fell off a cliff in Germany’s Hartz mountains in the late 1980s). Remember the Equs? Recall Wayne Cherry’s designs and the ‘droop snoot’ Firenza cars of the ’70s?

Don’t forget either that Sixten Sason’s one-time apprentice, a certain Mr Bjorn Envall (he of Saab, and Scandinavian Design), was a lead figure at Adam Opel design in the 1970s before he returned to the fold.

In fact there were many aerodynamic and stylistic synergies between Saab and Opel, and it is odd that these did not flourish under GM’s control in the late 1990s.

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All this occurred to me as I sat in an untypically British -18 degrees snow drift, high up in the hills of England’s West Country. I was waiting for the youths of today ( I am an old fart of 40 +) to stop spinning their wheels and to stop blocking our Saab’s progress.
Image was sourced from Flickr and is not related to the events described.

Young Brits you see, have no idea how to drive in snow. Watch BBC Worldwide or Sky to see footage of everyone revving madly, wheels spinning wildly as they try to drive on the snow before they hit brakes hard and wonder why they crash.

Swedes in front drive Saabs learn how to drive in snow and ice at their father’s or mother’s knee. As do Canadians and some Americans: Germans in rear drive BMWs are not so hot in snow though…

Anyway, the thoughts continue…..

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