Reports this morning indicate that General Motors' talks to sell Saab have failed. Now GM must decide whether to keep Saab, try to sell it again or wind it down. Just yesterday I mentioned GM's troubles. It's disappointing to see them continuing to struggle on such a fundamental level as to not even be able to sell its business units. But I think its problems selling Saab are particularly notable.
So now what happens to Saab? Bloomberg reports:
GM has a contingency plan for Saab similar to a process being used to wind down Saturn, the person said. Saab owners would continue to be covered by GM warranties and be assigned to a new dealership for service, the person said.
Saab isn't like Saturn. It's a brand originally founded back in 1937 in Sweden. It's also more of a luxury name. So this isn't some random experiment that GM started from scratch a few decades ago like Saturn. This was a well-established brand that GM managed to drive into the ground.
Of course, a more similar story could be told of Opel, another failed GM division sale. And that was founded even earlier -- back in the 1800s. Yet, GM had owned Opel for far longer than it had owned Saab -- since 1929 versus 1995. So it did its work very quickly with Saab.
But to be fair, Saab is also different from some of its peers in another way: it has a sort of cult following. At least, that's what I've observed over the years. There are those who love Saabs, those who hate Saabs and not many people in between. I'm sure GM has had a lot of trouble bridging the gap and trying to make Saab a more mainstream brand. And that's a shame, because anyone I've talked to who owned Saabs really liked them.
I find it bizarre that GM would be better off just winding down a brand like Saab rather than find someone to acquire it on the cheap. But perhaps GM really screwed up the brand so badly in 14 short years that buyers think it's beyond repair.
The news of Koenigsegg’s withdrawal from negotiations to purchase Saab is only the latest in the continuing saga of GM’s incompetent management. GM has taken an old and respected Swedish brand and run it into the ground. The fact that they were negotiating with a dilettante like Koenigsegg in the first place is clear evidence of their desperation and lack of imagination. Saab is much more emblematic of innovative and high-quality Swedish automobiles that Volvo ever was, and the current Swedish government’s failure to realize this has only made matters worse, as they have withheld guarantees of financing for other potential purchasers
Why is it that Saab doesn't appear in the list of brands on www.gm.com, under "Our vehicles"? Even Pontiac, Saturn and Hummer are there.
I owned Saabs throughout the '90s, and my parents had Saabs in the 1980s. They used to be great cars for drivers in snowy areas - good performance in the summer, and great traction in the winter. The decline in quality was evident from about 1996 on. My last Saab was my 1999 SE. Great car, but in 2005 when I sold it, they had a bad reputation for quality, and were far higher priced than the competition. I bought a Subaru.
Perhaps GM could package Saturn-Opel-Saab for sale, and call it SOS.
The Saab 900 (pre-GM) had it's engine mounted along the car's axis, rather than the transverse mount pioneered by the Austin Mini and copied everywhere. The 9-3 model, first under GM ownership, switched to transverse orthodoxy, and this was the beginning of end of Saab's unique vision.
However, it was said that a Saab owner was braver than a Rolls owner as the Saab cost more repair money to keep running - and a former friends 900S certainly confirmed the problem. GM had fourteen years to get Saab's electrics to work as well as a '63 Impala and they didn't. They didn't focus on the real problem, but rather wrung the uniqueness out of the product.
Ford didn't do any better with the German Ford (Merkur) Scorpio. It also had reliability problems and, instead of investing American production know-how into the Scorpio's electrics, they simply stopped importing the car after three years.