Car (or bike) Chat!

[Macca]

I'm guessing you are a big fan of 'Jay Leno's Garage'? I love that show.

[Gaz]

My 18 year old 140k mile Saab passed its MOT today with just a minor advisory

I feel like a proud father lol

[Ian7633]

My 18 year old 140k mile Saab passed its MOT today with just a minor advisory

I feel like a proud father lol

Good stuff, always a relief isn't it. My 20 year old BMW made it through without too much grief this year, just a new airflow meter, £90 from Euro car parts.

[Pigmy Pony]

My 18 year old 140k mile Saab passed its MOT today with just a minor advisory

I feel like a proud father lol

Shame that Saab are no more. From what I hear they were expected to build Saabs on a Vauxhall budget, but they refused to compromise on quality. so something had to give

[struth]

Loved my old saab. Drivers car

[Macca]

Shame that Saab are no more. From what I hear they were expected to build Saabs on a Vauxhall budget, but they refused to compromise on quality. so something had to give

Actually they were told to build Vauxhalls on a Vauxhall budget but they ignored that and carried on building Saabs. It was all going to end in tears one way or another.

[walpurgis]

The last couple of generations of Saabs were Vauxhalls under the skin anyway.

[walpurgis]

Loved my old saab. Drivers car

I had a Saab 99 in the eighties. It never went wrong, but I found it boring. Swapped it for a TR7, which did me OK until I got a 3.0 Capri Ghia auto.

[Alex_UK]

I had a Saab 99 in the eighties. It never went wrong, but I found it boring. Swapped it for a TR7, which did me OK until I got a 3.0 Capri Ghia auto.

And I bet the one that survived the longest was the Saab... The TR7 was a great looking car for the time, but really needed the rover V8 of the TR8. Capri would fetch a pretty penny now.


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[montesquieu]

The last couple of generations of Saabs were Vauxhalls under the skin anyway.

Not really. As Macca says they kept on building Saabs, and went bust. They used as little GM input as they could get away with. There's a famous story about how some hotshot from GM came to be an internal consultant on what was going wrong in Trolhattan, and got in a Saab as a hire car at the Airport. First thing he spotted was that it had a non-GM sat nav - Saab's design team had rejected the GM kit as not fit for purpose and gone off and ordered their own, short run, custom system at great expense, as in the old days. Mutiply that across multiple sub systems and it's pretty obvious what went wrong for them.

I had 10 Saabs in a row over a period of 25 years, the last being a 2009 9-5 Aero Anniversary Wagon. (Probably my favourite was a 9000 Griffin 2.3T, which on Millennium night - pre speed cameras everywhere and with cops having a night off after the world didn't end the night before, and the rest of the country nursing a hangover - took me from Glasgow to Weston Super Mare, south of Bristol, in four hours and 10 minutes including a petrol stop on the M5 at Dursley).

I would happily have bought the all-new 9-5 that came after my last one, but it didn't last long enough. Already there are shortage of parts even for cars like my old one that were quite old models, never mind the short-lived later model. But I would love to drive Saab again, I tried Lexus, have a Jag XF at the minute but neither have the originality or design flair of the old Saabs. (I'd certainly never buy anything from Germany).

I did visit Trolhattan, as a young journalist, in fact I used to write a motoring column for a Sunday newspaper back in another lifetime. (The 80s). Indeed that was what persuaded me to start driving Saabs in the first place and stop driving the Citroens or Alfa Romeos I had been mucking about with. Most car companies sent nubile young marketing ladies to entertain us over dinner. Saab sent their engineers who spent the evening drawing diagrams of anti lock braking systems on the back of napkins. Very refreshing. I'll never forget getting taken out the following morning on a forest rally stage by a very tall but rather bent and arthritic old bloke, who had to fold himself into the car that was being launched (facelift 9000 turbo if I recall correctly), and who then drove with utter calmness at speeds that felt more like we were in a jet fighter. His name: Eric Carlsson.