Saab’s new Chinese-Japanese owners need to understand the brand’s history – and get back to first principles – if they are to revive the much-loved Swedish car maker, says Mark Bursa.
It’s said the night is darkest before the dawn. And certainly, it’s looked pretty dark in Trollhattan, home of Saab, for the past year or so. As the last handful of the old Saab models headed for auction, it looked as if the lights had been turned out for the final time at the famous Swedish factory.
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But now there’s a proposed revival – it’s hardly a rescue and it’s certainly not a takeover – by the grandly named National Electric Vehicle Sweden. Does this really signal a new dawn?
NEVS is a new company owned 51% by National Modern Energy Holdings, an alternative energy group based in Hong Kong, and 49% by Japanese investment company Sun Investment. Sun will apparently contribute Japanese engineers and new technology for electric vehicles. But doubts remain about the ability of the new company to put together a valid revival plan. Other than the Trollhattan factory, NEVS hasn’t actually got its hands on a great deal.
General Motors won’t give it access to the newest Saab model, the 9-5, as it doesn’t want a Chinese company to have access to its current mass-market platform. And as yet, neither the defence firm Saab AB nor the truck manufacturer Scania have granted a license to use either the Saab name or the Griffin logo.
All NEVS has to work with is the old 9-3 platform. GM presumably doesn’t care so much about this as it’s based on the mid-1990s Opel Vectra platform. Hardly state-of-the-art. This will, apparently, be used to build electric vehicles, for sale mainly in China, where NEVS claims there is a burgeoning demand.
This plan looks decidedly shaky. EV sales have been desperately slow to get off the ground, as the combination of limited range and high purchase price is proving difficult to overcome. And building in high-cost Sweden and exporting to low-cost China looks less than sensible.
A new model could be developed from the so-called PhoeniX platform, developed post-GM by Saab when it was owned by Spyker. It contains very little in the way of GM componentry – less than 10%. Again, the suggestion is that this would be an electric car.
To make this work, it’s going to take some money. More than Spyker had, for a start. Spyker soon burned through the EUR1bn it had at its disposal, and quickly found itself back in bankruptcy. And Spyker was just trying to keep an existing model line going.
With hindsight, Spyker was trying to be too ambitious. Its break-even point was around 100,000 cars, which it might have achieved had there not been a global recession, and if it had built up sufficient cash to keep its suppliers happy. As it was, the constant scramble for cash meant the line kept grinding to a halt, leaving dealers frustrated and short of supply. And when that happens, even the most loyal Saab customers drift off to rival brands.
So how should NEVS go about rebuilding Saab? There are many lessons it could follow – and a lot of the signposts are there, in Saab’s own history, both recent and distant.
For the first 20-odd years of its corporate existence, Saab was a one-model line. And the succession of early models – 92, 93 and 96 – all owed much to the original prototype car that launched the aircraft maker’s car activities in the aftermath of World War 2. Saab is very fortunate in having the so-called ‘UrSaab’ as a cornerstone of its history. Most longer-established car companies’ earliest ‘horseless carriages’ have little relevance or resonance in the 21st century.
But the streamlined, teardrop-shaped UrSaab was wind-tunnel tested. It’s very cool, and still looks modern. The PhoeniX concept tried to reference it too, though in a slightly clumsy way, incorporating cues from other, later Saabs.
Keep it simple – New Saab needs New UrSaab. What better way to relaunch the company than via a retro saloon that closely references its original birth? And then develop a production model that simply updates the concept of the 93/96, a car line that was technically advanced for its time. It was front-wheel drive, with a downsized two-stroke engine and a flywheel system that allowed it to freewheel economically downhill.
And it was enormously successful as a rally car, the 96 winning both the RAC Rally and the Monte Carlo rally in the hands of Swedish rally maestro Erik Carlsson.
It’s still an instantly recognisable shape – production continued until 1980, and the Saab 96 is one of very few models of its time that could handle the ‘retro’ treatment that has proved so successful for the BMW Mini and Fiat 500. Even the shape lends itself to modern requirements – the 93/96 front-end is rounded and bulbous, just the sort of shape that’s needed in order to meet European pedestrian crash testing.
Spyker boss Victor Muller understood this – at the Geneva Show in 2009, he had images of a design study along the lines of a retro-96 on his iPhone. Trouble is, under his plans, it was a long way down the line.
NEVS should focus all its attentions on this project. Use the PhoeniX platform by all means, but it might be easier to outsource platform and powertrain. After all, a retro car does not have to be state-of-the-art. It’s almost 15 years since we first saw new Mini, and the car produced today is largely the same as the original concept. The Fiat 500 is essentially a low-cost car, made in Poland and incorporating innovative ideas such as the two-cylinder TwinAir engine. The VW Beetle is little more than a rebodied Golf.
In the current economy, you can be sure that several car companies would be prepared to licence a recent or current platform. Same for a range of Euro 5-compliant engines. So long as it meets crash testing, and the styling and finishes are good, then a retro-Saab would surely stand a chance of becoming the next Mini or Cinquecento.
It’s such an obvious shape, too, that you wouldn’t need a superstar stylist to design it. Muller himself penned the sketches he showed me three years ago. Working to a tight brief, a talented young RCA student should be able to come up with the goods.
A couple of years ago, I saw a similar concept at the Frankfurt Motor Show. Another iconic brand with a two-stroke past was the subject – the East German Trabant. A prototype “21st century Trabi” was on show, called the Trabant nT. The concept car had been designed by ex-VW stylist Nils Poschwetta.
The car was very recognisably a Trabant – down to the authentic paint job, light blue with white roof. It was a hatchback rather than a saloon, with more rounded body corners and a more bulbous nose with bigger headlamps. The powertrain was to be electric, and Poschwetta confirmed that the plan was to outsource a platform.
The electric powertrain was a way of saving costs – and EV motors are cheap, though batteries are not. There’s still a huge risk in hanging a project around a battery-electric powertrain. By all means keep it in mind, but I’d be very loath to hang the plan on an EV-only range.
The Trabant nT hasn’t come to fruition. The last we heard, in early 2011, was that the project’s backer (the head of German model car firm Herpa) was still looking for investment.
And frankly, Trabant, the East German Communist-era austerity brand famed for its papier-mache body and sputtering little engine, carries too much baggage. Saab’s brand is another matter. The only real negatives have been caused recently as the brand has lurched from unwarranted receivership to undeserved bankruptcy. It remains a much-loved nameplate, largely seen as blameless for its recent woes.
NEVS could learn much from the Trabant nT concept, especially the idea of outsourcing a platform. NEVS should abandon any ideas of dealing with GM on 9-5. Sadly, this thoroughly decent car won’t be coming back. Nor should NEVS try and revive the current 9-3. It needs a clean break from the GM era. Trollhattan is not currently producing, and it could be left mothballed until a new project is fully sorted.
But Trollhattan has to be central to the relaunch. It’s a highly efficient plant, and it confers authenticity to the project. Now that Sweden’s other car brand, Volvo, is Chinese-owned, the ownership issue is irrelevant. Volvo’s bosses at Geely have done very well by leaving the company to get on with things. NEVS needs to do the same.
Finally a deal needs sorting over the name. Clearly having access to the Saab name is vital – but I’d argue the griffin is less important. Saab has some charming aeronautically-inspired branding in its past, and bringing back a retro logo – as Fiat and Chrysler have done – could be an ideal solution.
This project will cost money, but it would make sense to keep the engineering spend to a minimum and maximise the marketing and distribution efforts. Like the Mini and the Fiat 500, a new “Saab 96” would be a high-fashion European product – an approach which is likely to maximise appeal elsewhere, for example in China.
And China is vital to give the volume to make such a project workable. BMW’s Oxford plant churns out more than 230,000 Minis a year. A new Saab could make sense on a fraction of that number. National Modern Energy is headed by Chinese businessman Jiang Dalong, who apparently once raised US$4.4bn to set up a biomass energy company in China. He may need to raise a similar amount to make sure Saab is finally facing a new dawn, not another false one.
