While my architect gently weeps

SAAB are out of the car business. General Motors, now majority-owned by the US Government and looking to either maximize or divulge themselves of their non-performing Euro investments (to wit the long-running and eventually-binned attempt to sell Vauxhall-Opel) have decided to wind up the Other Swedish Carmaker, after trying to flog the brand for the past year and having fielded sales interest from the likes of Koenigseggsegg (makers of incredibly rare and ferociously powerful bespoke supercars, like this one what tried to kill Top Gear's Stig), Dutchie sportscar makers Spyker, various Swedish industrialists and even geriatric F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone. Despite the quality of the bids, or probably because of them, GM have pulled the pin. So SAAB are no more.

That sound you can hear is every architect, dentist and marketing 'creative' you know (and I do hope you know very few) sobbing into their short blacks.

SAAB are no more because they deserve as much. They were always cars for tossers. People who should be driving Volvos, given their disinterest in actual driving - why else buy a car purely on safety credentials unless you're no good at driving and expecting to crash - but, being cretinously obsessed with image, are desperately keen to show how out-there, cutting-edge and tangential-to-the-mainstream they are. People who, in a previous generation, would have bought Citroens - and probably will have to again. Designers. Creatives. Public relations types. People who wear black skivvies and square-rimmed glasses. People for whom appearing to 'think different' (to nick an old Apple tag-line) is much more important than actually having any novel ideas. Marketing-led. Style over substance. Sell the sizzle not the steak. Leverage the synergy and pick the low hanging fruit, going forward.

Wankers, basically.

All of this is compounded by the fact that they're actually not very good cars. Sure, they're idiosyncratic, like a lot of European cars. Some Euro cars are idiosyncratic in a cool way, like the way Alfa Romeo prioritizes going around corners over connecting the electrics up properly. Volvos, these days, are almost cool, in a distressed Baltic pine bookshelf from Ikea sort of way. They're still bought by the same lot of miserable gits who can't drive, but at least the company is trying. SAAB never tried. They plugged a bunch of pointless 'innovations' - like having the ignition switch in the centre console - into a basic platform that was, in performance applications, inherently flawed: a nose-heavy front wheel drive car with a fucking great turbocharger on it. The problem with which being the laws of physics, whether Newtonian, relativistic or quantum, relating to the inability for two wheels to do both the steering and the delivering of fucking ludicrous levels of POWERRRR through. As demonstrated below in a cloud of smoke and a pretzel of torque steer by the reserved and even-handed Mr Clarkson. (If nothing else, check out the vid just for the impossibly toss-laden '80s TV ad for the SAAB 900 in the opening.)



And if you don't have a turbo version, you're just wasting your time. A few years back a mate of mine - a postdoc out from the UK - was looking for a car, and I was giving him a hand with the search. We test-drove an early-90s SAAB 900 S, the old-school, very upright looking shape that had been around since the late '70s. It was in good nick, well looked after, well priced, decent economy, hatchback rear end meant it was practical enough - but it felt more dated than your old man's tie rack, was cramped as hell inside, seemed allergic to corners and the 2.3L four cylinder would not have pulled a sailor off your sister. My mate bought it. It was perfect for him. He didn't actually like driving much.

That bloke didn't fit the mould of SAAB drivers that well, because he was a good bloke, rather than a smug self-involved git who you wanted to slap. Another owner I knew was much more as per programme. This other guy had a mid-90s, second-gen 900S, the model which eventually became the 9-3 when GM took it over, which despite being an underpowered, front-drive shopping trolley, he appeared to think was half a degree of separation from a WRC-spec tarmac rally car. He seemed to be under the misapprehension that (a) SAAB = European = good handling = good at driving fast, and (b) he was good at driving fast. Torque-steering violently across the centreline at 25km/h over the posted limit through the twists of Swann Road in Taringa (with Your Correspondent and colleagues white-knucking the doorhandles and looking for the emergency exits) clearly indicated neither (a) nor (b) was strictly true. Nor was it strictly the case that he fitted the mould of SAAB owners in that he didn't own it because he wanted to impress other 'creatives' in the carpark of his architecture firm, his industrial design consultancy or his marketing agency. He owned it because his daddy bought it for him. Still, he was clearly a tosser, so he was 'brand-compliant' in that respect.

The end for SAAB was being bought by GM. Unlike Ford with Volvo, GM didn't really seem to know what to do with SAAB. The most recent 9-3 was basically a reskinned Opel Vectra. And like other entry-level luxury cars based on more povvo underpinnings - for instance the Jaguar X-Type, which was largely Ford Mondeo bits in a retro-looking skin - it got roundly ignored by the buying populous, because the majority of the car-buying populous are, surprisingly, not complete fucking muppets. If they were, Hummer wouldn't have lost money like 50 Cent at a strip club. Even the Americans - who are apparently now the world's moral police, to whom every sovereign nation must submit their cultural memes for approval, lest they get offended by ads for chicken featuring West Indies fans (but that's an off-topic rant for elsewhere) - saw through the most egregious badge-engineered SAABs, the awful 9-2X and 9-7X SUVs, which were based on Subaru Imprezas (the infamous 'Saabaru') and Chevy Tahoe 4WDs respectively with dodgy SAABish noses grafted on the front. Basically, GM couldn't have been more clear on their value of the brand had the CEO taken a dump on the logo and put it on YouTube.

Still, SAAB won't be mourned, because they never actually produced anything worthy of mourning. Even their best credentialled efforts, their famed turbos of the 80s - as iconic of stock-market-fuelled wank as square-shouldered pastel jackets, brick-like cellphones and freshly chopped lines of coke - were inherently flawed, somewhat like the other vehicle of choice for the Gordon Geckos of the '80s, the 911 Porsche. The former had too much power for the front wheels to manage, and too much turbo lag to make it remotely useable. The latter had its engine in the arse like a big fuck-off pendulum, and rotated at high speed, usually into roadside furniture. Porsche acknowledged this, but rather than fixing the problem by moving the weight of the engine somewhere sensible, with typical stubbornness just kept refining the handling, suspension and weight distribution over the years until the 911 became, as it is now, no longer a significant danger to motorists or the general public, in particular those standing on the outside of wet roundabouts. SAAB, faced with the shortcomings of the 900 Turbo, just kept turning up the boost and making the 'Turbo' logo bigger. Marketing over substance. Just like the muppets who bought the things.

Goodbye, SAAB. In the words of the D4, you were too stupid to live.

The Doctor is OUT.