A Belgian car show and the Spanish Saab dealer tour

Today is the last day of the French dealer tour. The French, as well as the German tour, was divided into two groups, in order to visit the whole country in only two weeks. Today the cars made their last visits, one group in Bayonne and one in Toulouse. I don’t know who will stay in the south and who will go north, but the information we have received says that one group will be heading to Belgium and the other to spain.

According to SAABLOG-In the Saab 9-5 SC and the 9-4x will be at the first motor show of Waregem(Belgium), just between Gent(B) and Lille(F)

The Car show will last only this weekend, from 14:00 till 18:00 on Saturday and from 10:00 till 18:00 on Sunday. Entry is only 5€ and from the site you can download a voucher that will reduce the entry to only 3€.

Saab seems to be well placed, just at the entrance, so it will be good for Saab to be there, and I hope people will talk more about the cars than about the current situation.

The Saab presence seems to be organized by the local dealer GARAGE CALLENS-BOUCKAERT. So all thumbs up to this dealer for showing that support for the brand, and also thumbs up for Saab for being able to make so much noise in continental Europe with only two cars.

One month ago I was in Barcelona and saw this Billboard, this was a changing Billboard and the other Brands announced where BMW and Jaguar.

For me Barcelona is the right place to own a Saab. When I was young and lived there, Saabs where very special cars, the 900 was for me a very eccentric car, but the 9000 was a good looking replacement of a BMW or Mercedes, sorry Audi was an unknown word at that time in Barcelona. And for a young man like me seeing Saab and Porsche in the same dealership added some coolness to the brand, 900 and 911 side by side.

So, yes you still see quite a lot of Saabs in Barcelona, and mostly in the more well-offs parts of the city, that is why that when I saw that Billboard I thought about doing a dealer tour in Spain could be a very good Idea.

And yesterday Swade announced at inside.saab that a Spanish dealer tour would take place. The second group of cars from the French tour will start a tour in Spain starting on Saturday November 26th in the nice city of Girona. They will them move west on the northern part of Spain till A Coruña, where the tour will arrive on the 2nd of December. They will re-start the journey on the 12th of December in the south of Spain, then moving to the Balearic Islands and then going to Madrid where Saab Spain has also its office.

The week between the 2nd and the 12th of December is a week with two national holidays in spain, and private people tend to make short trips on that week. So I’ve been told that on that week the cars will be presented to the leasing companies and fleet managers, and everything will take place in Madrid.

On a map the route looks like this.

Stay tuned for pictures and impressions from the different dealerships.

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It seems that the first 9-4x is already on Spanish soil.

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Some (personal) words on further tours. Since now the tours have taken place in countries where Saab is in charge of the sales. The only missing countries are Italy in the south and Denmark, Norway and Finland in the north. So maybe we will see a dealer tour in Italy, but the rest depends on the local importer. As we have seen with this Belgian motor show, Saab is also providing the cars to the importers (Beherman in that case), so it is only up to the importer to spend some money in such a tour or not.

The UK case is a little bit different. At least one dealer was showcasing the 9-5 Wagon last weekend, maybe more will follow.