Saab Saga

The world is rife with carlines and brands that what to be BMW’s.  GM , after some half-heated attempts at being cool, dropped the Saab from the Saab line up, and made the brand sell cars as bland as Honda Accords, but expected premium prices.

This isn’t to say that Saab didn’t need four-door sedans.  In fact, they did.  But they also needed to sell Saabs, and the Saabs were killed off.  Where was the crazy three-door Turbo?  Where was the “follow your own road” Saab that attract all those buyers over the years?  Ordinary sedans and wagons might well have been useful line extensions, but not if you kill off the essential Saab-ness.

While “car guys” decry the P&G School of marketing, let’s use a little thought experiment.  Crest is the world’s leading toothpaste brand.  It is the franchise in toothpaste. It has spawned Crest mouthwash and Crest white strips.  You can buy Crest toothbrushes as well as (near as I can tell) thousands of different kinds of Crest toothpaste.  But in the end, you can still buy Crest toothpaste, as approved by the American Dental Association.  Surely GM, of all automakers, could understand this?

What GM did was do Saab spin-offs, but they killed off the toothpaste.  No more proof is needed than the worst badge engineering of the new millennium, the 9-2X “Saab-aru” and the 9-7X monster SUV.  What were they thinking?  Sure, GM could use its worldwide resources to create a small Saab in concert with one of its many partners.  In a world where retro was cool, why not a 21st century Saab 93 or 95?  With an Erik “On the Roof”Carlsson edition?  Instead of that, Saab dealers were induced to sell a luxury Subaru trim series.  We were left with a brand that was all White Strips and Mouthwash, but the toothpaste was gone.

There was the indignity of the 9-7X, otherwise known as the Chevy Trailblazer.  Actually, the 9-7X was a nice piece, for an SUV.  Margins were tightened up and the ride height was lowered.  Overall, it was the SUV that Oldsmobile could have sold in the hundreds of thousands.  But a Saab?  Pushrod engines, and a hulking body-on-frame SUV?  GM had the wherewithal to provide Saab with the Saab of SUV’s, and instead foisted on the hapless Swedes the 9-7X.

Of course, what happened with Saab was what has happened with any number of brands.  Management hollowed out the core, trying to pursue an image leader (usually BMW for import brands) and made the most amazing mistakes.

Volvo, for example, is trying to move “upmarket”, and as a consequence, the only Volvo remaining in the line up is the V70.  There’s a luxury Volvo (be sure to order the Oxymoron Package) in the S80, and there’s a front-drive 3-series wannabe, the S60.  There are both faux and real SUVs.  But where is the iconic Volvo “College Professor Edition”, an S70 with room for Lars, Sven, Anders and Gustav?

We see Acura giving up there core niche of cool racers and Euro Hondas, pursuing the elusive front drive BMW Grail, as well.

What many execs miss, though, is that world is crying out (albeit at volumes of 5% of the market or less) for a bit of personality and style.  The MINI isn’t “most” people’s cup of Earl Gray, but a full plant’s worth of production is ordered through BMW’s Canley Plant – ironically inherited from the Bavarian firm’s “English Patient”.  Anyone who wants a three-series can buy one already.  Where are the Saab Turbos, Volvo S70s, Acura Integras and Legends, Pontiac Firebirds, MGB’s, Ford Thunderbirds, or any of a number of surprising niches in the world?  The Camaro may be only Chevy’s third best-selling car, but how many of those are going to fleets?  Chrysler made a ton of money aping a 1932 Ford.  German managers were ashamed to sell hundreds of thousands New Beetles, and are finally killing off the car.  This phenomenon works in reverse, too.  By all accounts, the Holden Monaro was a wonderful car.  But when you call it a “GTO”, people have expectations for style and presence that were not met.  Note to auto executives all over the world – this is a clue that the market is waiting for a real “Goat”.  Oops, the government had GM kill Pontiac.  Looks like a long wait.  The lesson? Automakers all over the world are squandering their heritage and ignoring the opportunities their customers are clamoring for.

But Saab was GM’s, and oddly GM never did recover from the loss of Oldsmobile.  If Cadillac was the “rich man’s” car and Buick the “Doctor’s” car, then Oldsmobile was the “Engineer’s” car, where GM tried out all their neat technological advances.  Saab, Saturn, and to some extent, Hummer, were all Oldsmobile surrogates, but the appeal of these brands were too narrow with far too few dealers to make for an Olds replacement.  Saab had some technical interest, certainly it had the potential given the “Born from Jets” theme.  Saturn, too, had its technical advances in engine design and manufacturing.  Even Hummer could have filled that “truck side” need at Oldsmobile wit its own iconic heritage and style.  Even as Hummer image suffered in the minds of many, what better brand to showcase advanced hybrid fuel savings or available diesel technology than Hummer?  It isn’t hard to imagine a 35-mpg Diesel H3, or 25 mpg in an H2 with GM dual mode hybrid powerplant.  

Instead of having Oldsmobile, though, GM killed the brand and treated the three little brands as if they each had the 1600 dealers that Oldsmobile had, and the sales to match.  Saab got more and more boring, Saturn became more and more mainstream, and Hummer just became an embarrassment, mainly because no one wanted to take up the fuel economy challenge, despite available technology.  

In the end, all three were wasted opportunities, but the biggest waste was that Saturn and Olds were not merged, and if GM felt that they needed a Jeep knock off, that Hummer was not paired with Oldsmobile, giving a new truck brand a strong foundation, and dealers a wide and interesting range of products.

It is perhaps not surprising that Victor Muller is the one using terms like “passion”, “iconic” and “honored to shepherd”.  GM, ironically, was willing to permit their own icons Oldsmobile and Pontiac perish due to neglect.  It may well be true that they needed to die at the point they were taken off life support, but what was GM thinking in the decades-long slide that led to these results?  The demise of Saab is truly small (fingerling) potatoes in the grand scheme of things that the Götterdämmerung of GM has become.

Let’s hope that Spyker and Heer Muller have a plan that will rescue the Saab brand and its quirkiness will be on the road for a long time to come.  But as Damon Runyon once said, “The race isn’t always to the swift, nor the fight to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.”