Saab will Expand Systematically

After many years struggling beneath the slow, dead hand of GM management, Saab is in an expansionist mood once once more. Not just to create the autos planned below GM management (9-5 sedan and Sportcombi, and 9-4X crossover), but to perform its personal replacement for the 9-3. It also desires ultimately to perform a 9-1 or 9-2 compact automobile.

But first things first. The company has two important all-new autos to launch inside the subsequent two years. The 9-5 was noticed on the 2009 Frankfurt exhibit and can go on sale in 2010, using a Sportcombi wagon to follow in and 2011. The second is the 9-4X crossover, which was previewed accurately by the idea at the Detroit auto show in 2008. The manufacturing version shares platform and dimensions with all the Cadillac SRX and is going to be constructed alongside it in Mexico.

U.S. sellers are crying out for this stuff. With the separation from GM, Saab will sell only about 8500 automobiles within the U.S. in 2009. Its ideal year was 2006, with 47,000 U.S. sales. The existing 9-5 is out of manufacturing and the brand new one doesn't ship till spring. Sellers from the States are surviving on applied autos and service business.

The 9-5 and 9-4X need to bring Saab's U.S. dealers back to life -- if they haven't died first.

2010 Saab 7 five Rear 3 Quarters View Passenger
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What's striking -- and much more than just a little brave -- about the brand new Saab is that its administration wishes to go beyond the GM plans and replace the 9-3 with a automobile which is "more unlikely than likely" (according to Global Brand & Sales Operations Director Knut Simonsson) to be derived from a GM platform. And that beyond that, he indicates, Saab wants to create a compact, a 9-1, that will take a lot of inspiration from the 9-X BioHybrid idea first noticed in the Geneva auto show in 2008.

Saab usually sells 100,000-150,000 autos a year globally. How can such a small firm have such big ambitions? No car firm this small within the modern era has ever survived independently with all the exception of Porsche, which sells far more expensive vehicles. Of course, Porsche is now part of the VW Group.

By contrast, Saab is now part of the Koenigsegg Group. The tiny Swedish supercar maker's automotive business enterprise consists of fewer than 50 employees making about a dozen cars and trucks a year. Not exactly VW, or even the brand new GM.