| Monday, April 27, 2009 |
07:31 - Monday of the Great Purge
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/gm-kills-pontiachummer-saab-and-saturn/
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Pontiac, HUMMER, Saab, and Saturn are gone. Well, "to be phased out" and due for "resolution" within a year or two.
Far more qualified people than me are writing their obituaries, but for my part I just want to say that GM should never have taken over Saab. The mistakes of the other branding-stunt marques are too obvious to list, but for some reason Saab is the closest one to my heart, and the one getting shortest shrift in all the widespread word-bandying of late.
My college friend Allison had a Saab 9-5 after her Accord bit the dust, and she adored it through several years in the Boston snows. Hatchbacks on sedans? Center-console keys? heated seats in a time when electric windows were still pretty nifty? Kooky, but functional—and often born of cold-climate engineering. Saabs always looked like what you'd get if you called a Martian on the phone and had him build you a car based on your verbal description (to paraphrase a quip I heard once), but they were always oddly cool. To say nothing of stylish; the 9-3 convertible in As Good as It gets was just one of many notable movie appearances, and one where it looked unaccountably enviable at a time when I was aspiring to a Jetta because I'd recently ridden in a Golf Cabrio and loved the severe yet fun aesthetic that it seemed to share with that 9-3. Saab was one of a kind: doing its own thing, making mistakes here and there, but overall bulldozing through to pigheaded excellence, everyone else be damned.
And then GM took over, inexplicably, and set about destroying everything that made it unique. Gone were the hatchbacks. Gone were the weird rear-window angles. About the only thing they didn't get rid of were the center-console keys, but only because that was one of the few cheap ways they could badge-engineer yet another semi-portable model from another marque into a lineup that didn't want or need it, which they did on two occasions, with the 9-2x (Subaru WRX) and 9-7x (Chevy Trailblazer). In the end Saab was little more than Saturn became: a hodgepodge of preexisting cars from other brands, mashed together like hipsters in an episode of The Real World where they all have to learn to live together despite the one's muddy cowboy boots and the other's gothy poetry, because dammit, they all have that funky Swedish grille design now, so play that wistful credits music already.
Time to call it done. Hell, it was time years ago. Now all we have left are the bitter memories of the anonymous latter years, instead of the quirky fun of the 70s and 80s. It could have been Audi, reinventing itself according to ancient tradition, and emerging as a world leader showing everyone else the way ahead. But instead, it became a portfolio and a set of line-items on an ever-shrinking balance sheet—anything but a car.
It deserved better. Let's hope it can be sold off like Jaguar and Aston Martin, and ends up in the hands of someone who can resurrect it—rather than facing extinction, like Oldsmobile and now Pontiac.
UPDATE: But then perhaps there's hope...
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Brian Tiemann
