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Interesting, I like both companies, I hope they don't fail together.
By James MaySaab's saviourWho better to buy the troubled Swedish marque from General Motors than a small, wacky Dutch company?The first proper and enduring girlfriend I ever had came into my world in the passenger seat of a Saab. It was a 99, white with a blue stripe down the side, and trimmed within with a velour that I'm forced to describe as ginger.It was her father's and he loved it. This was the late Seventies, in the industrial north of England, when even driving a Mercedes-Benz whiffed faintly of treachery. Driving a Swedish car marked you down as a dangerous radical in need of careful monitoring.I liked it, too, and so did Geoff Boycott if I'm remembering the ads correctly. It was a good looking car, with a quirky cabin and that nonsense with the ignition key. A year or two later, when we were old enough to drive, we were allowed to borrow it occasionally. But then she pranged it on a roundabout which, as usual, was somehow deemed to be my fault, and soon after that this particular avenue of youthful pleasure was closed to me.I remember the Saab very clearly. There was something creative and artistic about a Saab that just wasn't there in the Austin Allegro. The father of another girl I liked had a Volvo 244, but that car merely gave automotive substance to his attitude towards my approaches to his daughter – square, edgy, overly concerned with safety. I rarely made it up the driveway, to be honest, because a Volvo just said no. The Saab father was more liberal. I've always liked a Saab.Eventually, I had one, a 900, in the mid-Nineties, but by then we all knew a Saab was really a Vauxhall/Opel pro-forma with a space marked "insert curious Swedish bit here". The key still went in the wrong place and there were some funny buttons, but driving a Saab was not the wheeled act of defiance it once was. And now, thankfully, Saab has this week been rescued from the scrapheap onto which General Motors threatened to throw it by that wacky Dutch lot, Spyker.I think the fate of Saab is indicative of what has happened to the art of the car in my lifetime. Once, an individualistic maker like Saab could go its own way and tempt the odd free-thinking father away from the convention of British Leyland and Ford. But then the pressures of legislation and the prohibitive cost of research and development forced them to seek mentors in the form of huge organisations such as GM. This would safeguard the future of smaller marques, and we said this of Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Aston Martin, Jaguar and their ilk.The downside is that when times are tough these marginal car makers are the obvious ones to cast aside, rather in the way that people give up the lobster thermidor rather than the Sunday roast during a recession.But a part of me also thinks that the argument about research and development costs is nonsense. Yes, the amount of engineering required of a car to meet modern demands has grown enormously, but then modern technology has made, for example, the production of one-off components – "prototyping", to use the industry jargon – much easier. Small volumes, production flexibility and personalisation are the vogue these days, so really the time is right for small car makers, surely?And here we are (at least at the time of writing) with Spyker and GM reaching a binding agreement over Saab. Spyker can hardly claim to be a big car-making concern. It employs fewer than 200 people and its yearly output equates to what Toyota manufactures every eight minutes or so.I think this might be interesting. Other, massive car makers would consider Saab as a slightly left-field curiosity; something of an indulgence and a way of making themselves appear more interesting. GM owning Saab is really no different from my old girlfriend's father owning a Saab back in 1978. But to Spyker, Saab is a towering mainstream colossus. Spyker buying Saab is like the treasurer of a residents' association buying Barclays Bank.But now fire up your internet and take a look at the Spyker C8. Do we really want the people who came up with that to be building a regular four-door saloon?Yes please.
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