Mention the name “Saab” in conversation with any car-minded individual today, and you’ll usually get either a chuckle or a shudder, followed by a comment along the lines of how it was a shame GM let the brand go to dust and that thankfully Saab is out of its misery. I say this because there was a time when Saabs were truly something of a unique breed, and this uniqueness, dare I say “quirkiness” was why Saab had such a loyal following.
Saabs were a thinking person’s premium car, and in a world where one of comfortable means could have taken his or her checkbook to their local BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Cadillac, or Lexus dealer and bought a car of similar decadence for a similar price, the Saab buyer sought something these mass market brands couldn’t offer. You see, as with any luxury good, and by “luxury”, I mean something consumed out of want versus need, Saabs were purchased because they offered unique, somewhat unconventional qualities that made their owners feel special.
By the time this 2004 9-5 sport wagon rolled around, Saabs were far from the same level of special that they once were — a direct consequence of General Motors’ involvement (acquiring 50 percent of shares in 1990) and eventual controlling 100 percent of the brand of the brand by 2000. It’s unfortunate, but the small independent Swedish automaker lacked the resources necessary to develop new models.
The 1985 Saab 9000, whose basic underpinnings were part of a joint-venture with Alfa Romeo, Fiat, and Lancia, was the first such “mixed breed” Saab, but it simply wasn’t enough. By this time, the automaker was in serious need of a fruitful investor, and General Motors proved the much needed devil that Saab would sell its soul to.
While one shouldn’t be so quick to rebuke GM specifically, as a similar fate for Saab could’ve occurred had any other large automaker gained a controlling interest in the brand, the fact of the matter is that Saab’s fate did ultimately lie in the hands of General Motors. GM’s capital and resources allowed Saab a chance for new product development, yet this gain came at a cost.
GM’s large portfolio of brands competing in similar segments meant that in an effort to save funds, all new Saab models developed under the umbrella of GM would share a significant amount of DNA with cars from other GM brands. What’s worse, is that with so many higher-profit brands to concentrate on, GM would largely ignore the Saab brand, and starve it of significant model updates and new product development.
One of the few occasions under GM’s control when Saab did receive some much-needed attention came in 1997 with the introduction of the the executive class 9-5. A brand-new model which served as direct replacement for the 9000, the 9-5 was not entirely new, as it did share its smaller 900 (and soon to be 9-3) brother’s GM2900 platform, a platform derived from the far more pedestrian Opel Vectra.
In any event, the Saab 9-5 was at least mostly all-new, and featured a rather noteworthy list of innovative features. While Saab was the first automaker to make heated front seats standard in 1971, with the 9-5 Saab introduced ventilated front seats to the world, finally offering a remedy to those who cringed at the thought of emerging from his or her leather-lined luxury car with sweat stains on a hot summer day. Speaking of cooling, the 9-5 also placed an air conditioning duct in the front glove box, enabling cooling to the degree of 45 Fahrenheit to perfectly chill a bottle of Absolut or some pickled herring.
Advanced climate control conveniences were not the only impressive features of the new 9-5; engineers sought out to make it one of the safest cars around with a host of standard safety features and technologies. Among them included dual-stage side airbags, active front head restraints, three-point inertia reel seat belts for all passengers, antilock brakes with electronic brake distribution and traction control system, and highly reinforced safety cage with pendulum B-pillars and three front and rear load paths on each side to evenly distribute energy in the event of a collision.
As a matter of fact, in 2003 the 9-5 was named the safest car on the road by Sweden’s largest insurance agency, Folksam, based on personal injury statistics collected over the preceding two years. It was also the first car ever awarded the highest possible rating in EuroNCAP crash testing.
Riding on the aforementioned Opel Vectra platform, Saab strengthened the chassis by a claimed 70% and added four-wheel independent suspension for superior handling and comfort. As with the 9000 and all other Saabs that came before it, the 9-5 was front-wheel drive. Unlike later generation 9-5s and 9-3s, the first generation 9-5 did not offer all-wheel drive as an option.
European-spec 9-5s offered a host of diesel and gasoline engines, while in North America, turbocharged petrol engines were the only choices, and it is worth noting that they were all Saab exclusives. Initially, buyers could select the base B205 2.0-litre turbo I4 (185 hp), the optional B308 3.0-litre V6 — which started life as GM’s 54° V6 with the addition of a unique asymmetrical single turbocharger (200 hp), and the “performance” B235 2.3-litre turbo I4 (230 hp). By the end of production, the 9-5 Aero’s B235R 2.3-litre turbo I4, was producing nearly 260 horsepower and 270 lb-ft torque. Four cylinders were available with either the engaging 5-speed manual or 4- and later 5-speed automatic transmissions, while the V6 was only available with the automatic.
Most significantly was the fact that unlike the 9000, which offered a popular 5-door hatchback bodystyle, the 9-5 instead would offer a wagon bodystyle. Joining the two-year-old sedan for the 1999 model year, this highly seductive looking 9-5 wagon was Saab’s first wagon since the last 95 in 1978, and the brand’s first 4-door wagon ever. What’s more is that with 231,357 total units produced, the 9-5 wagon accounted for some 47.8% total production of first generation 9-5 production — a feat while not necessarily notable to Europeans, is one very astonishing in the generally wagon-averse culture of North America.
Wearing sleek, ravishing sheetmetal, the 9-5 wagon boasted 37 cubic feet of cargo volume with the rear seats in place and some 73 cubic feet with the rear seat bottoms removed and backs folded flat. Innovative features exclusive to the 9-5 wagon included “CargoTracks” aluminum rail tracks on each side of the cargo floor and an optional sliding load floor capable of extending out nearly 20 inches beyond the rear hatch and supporting up to 440 pounds of weight.
Indeed, during its early years the Saab 9-5 was a very compelling and competitive executive class luxury-sports sedan and wagon. While not without imperfections, the 9-5 lured onlookers with spirited turbo engines, sumptuous accoutrements, and seductive styling, all while providing a uniquely Swedish sense of personality and ambiance.
Unfortunately, its prime years led to middle-aged years and then to very elderly years, with little in the way of major, meaningful updates. Apart from minor revisions to its styling, powertrain, and list of available features, the truth is that the 9-5 soldiered on for thirteen years over a single generation without significant changes. Its second facelift added rather cartoonish chrome front fascia accents, and around this time towards the end of the 9-5 wagon’s life, Saab began marketing it as the “SportCombi” rather than the “Sport Wagon”, though the body itself did not change.
Though its heavily revised economy-based chassis may have provided the 9-5 with competitive ride and handling qualities in the late-1990s, by the late-2000s it was embarrassingly unrefined. For comparison, during that first generation 9-5’s run, competitors from Volvo, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW existed in two or three generations.
9-5 wagon production ended in February 2010, some eight months after the first generation 9-5 sedan ended production. While GM ultimately did get around to giving the 9-5 a second generation, by this point it was too little, too late. The second generation 9-5’s commencement of production nearly coincided with the sale of Saab to Spyker, yet both companies soon ran out of money and 9-5 production came to a halt, never to start back up again. Even more mournful is the fact that a new 9-5 SportCombi wagon was being readied for production, with several pre-production examples even produced. Yet another sob Saab story.
Featured Saab 9-5 photographed at Larz Anderson Park in Brookline, Massachusetts – August 2019
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Great story.
Loved the 9-5 and the 9-3. Ultimately likef every 2000’s Saab. And it was the weird lust for Saabs that got me engaged in the Swedish culture and then made me a die-hard fan of its rival, Volvo.
I still want to own a last gen 9-5 one day.
Go swift…..Go safe….Go………SAAB!
You know how much I crap on about ventilated seats and how great they are… But I had no idea Saab was the first to introduce them! Thanks for that factoid.
Great piece, Brendan. The wagons were genuinely great looking cars (the sedans were alright) but these stayed around for an embarrassingly long time. The later years’ addition of the GM Black Tie radio made the dash look especially dated, like it was an aftermarket head unit wedged into an old dash. And that final facelift is like a trainwreck, I can’t look away.
I just bought a 2008 9-3 convertible and waited until I found one I liked that had the optional navigation. The radio/CD interface via the nav screen is much nicer-looking than the standard black-tie radio; it’s much more elegant when turned off, too, for that matter. I don’t think many were originally sold with nav because it was a $2740 option (so says the window sticker).
SAAB s are great cars and their fans are great too! As I was actually there at the 50th anniversary SAAB owners convention when the 9-5. Was unveiled in North America, they not only explained the seats as being the first to be ventilated in a mass produced car (I think truckers may have enjoyed that feature for years but I’m not sure); there was another first for SAAB that also involved the seats: they were anti-whiplash seats! They had the headrest come forward and meet your head if you were nailed in the back. Although Volvo claimed this in one of their advertisements a year later for one of their cars, I heard it first as a SAAB safety feature on the 9-5.
Even before Saab went under I thought the second-gen 9-5 should’ve launched as a wagon first with the sedan (planned) to follow. It would’ve been the volume seller in Sweden and across Europe and the one the hard-core Saab faithful here were waiting for; conquest sales in America and a stab at China with the sedan could come later, after ramp-up (if there had been a “later” which there wasn’t).
I completely agree with that view,nlpnt. A perspective not considered previously by me but I think you’re absolutely right FWIW.
I worked with a guy who had one of these, from right around that year. He called it Lars. He bought it with some years and miles already on it and it was a pretty good car for him, though mainly for high school/college age kids.
The thing I remember most about it was the cupholder. In the dash picture, it is the little black vertical slit to the right of the stereo unit. In quirky Saab fashion, press it and it came straight out from the dash at you, followed by unpacking itself so that the cup holding part went horizontal from vertical. In costcutting/unthinking GM fashion there was only one of them.
Video of the cupholder at work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNzOA8UXkl0
Does your colleague still have that Saab? And do you remember it being heavy on maintenance?
I lost touch with him about 4 years ago. I found it heavy on maintenance, but then I was driving a Honda. 🙂 He was pretty mechanically inclined and could deal with most of the car’s failings. But yes, he spent more weekends working on his car than I spent working on mine.
I own a 2003 Saab 9-5 right now – it’s been very low on maintenance for me and I’ve owned it for 5 years.
I absolutely love this car.
I’m about to sell it since I need something with an automatic transmission for driving in DC. That’s the only reason I would part with it, and I’m sad to do so.
I remember my first car was purchased while in the US Air Force. It was a two owner SAAB 900 Turbo hatchback from 1986. It was also the first SAAB car I had ever seen since I knew they made aircraft but never knew they made cars. Anyway, a year later I drove to the SAAB convention in New hampshire (1997) from Phoenix Arizona, for the 50th anniversary celebration . they debuted the 9-5 and let us climb in. ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE was THRILLED over that very same cup holder “experience”! SAABs never had cup holders because Europeans didnt eat in their cars like we north Americans do. The seats were also talked about too but the cup holder got so many ooohhhs and aaahhhhs.
I just returned from a trip to western Massachusetts. Seemed like there were more Saabs on the streets and in driveways under repair then here in New Jersey. It was very nice to see, perhaps it was the influence of the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut?
“perhaps it was the influence of the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut?”
Kurt Vonnegut was originally from Indianapolis, but left. Perhaps he took all the Saabs with him (leaving the Buicks behind?) 🙂
Vonnegut’s line on the old two-stroke Saabs always made me laugh:
“But if you stayed away too long, window shade or not, the oil would separate from the gas and sink like molasses to the bottom of the tank. So when you started up again, you would lay down a smokescreen like a destroyer in a naval engagement. And I actually blacked out the whole town of Woods Hole at high noon that way…”
Funny — I also just returned from a weekend in Massachusetts, and also noticed an unusual number of Saabs (all newer models like this 9-5… with one exception of a 4-dr. base 900, so no others).
Despite my longheld affection for Saabs, these later models leave me emotionless. And sad.
Saabs were particularly popular with liberals, doctors and professor types, therefore, Massachusetts was one of their largest markets in the U.S. Furthermore, it helped that most Saab dealers in Massachusetts were family owned by the same families who opened them in the ’60s and ’70s up until the end, thus establishing lasting relationships with their loyal buyers.
Growing up in Massachusetts, the suburban upper middle class I was surrounded by greatly favored Saabs and Volvos to other European, American, and Japanese luxury cars. There was something more sensible about them.
About 2003 or so a friend was searching for a late model Volvo C70 convertible. He was working with a dealer/friend who frequented the auctions. He told me that for every C70 convertible up for auction there would be 10 Saab convertibles. GM must have been pushing lease deals a couple of years earlier.
That aircraft – a fighter jet to be sure, appears to be a Saab Gripen. A quick read on Wikipedia indicates this aircraft is still in current production. To me, that indicates Saab is still an entity, albeit not on the automotive side.
I have not seen a Saab car in years in the wild.
The 9-5 (and 9000 before it) was a great looking car, especially in wagon form. It is curious how it took so long for it to be developed, the incremental cost can’t be that significant unless you redo everything like Peugeot used to. The seats alone, “sumptuous” is the word that comes to mind.
And yeah, that Tammy Faye Bakker makeover near the end of life was horrific. But the svelte new 9-5 and especially the wagon that only made it to prototype form made up for it. (Many of those prototypes ended up getting registered throughout Europe after much work by their owners that bought them during the liquidation auction). I can only imagine the hurdles they have to jump when a wagon specific part breaks…
Lol, I was myself trying to find the right words to describe that awful last makeover that made the 9-5 into an amorphous blob, but you nailed it….
> I can only imagine the hurdles they have to jump when a wagon specific part breaks…
Probably only slightly more difficult than finding actual 9-4X parts, since only about 700 were made before Saab collapsed. Most parts are shared with either the 9-5 or Cadillac SRX platform-mates, but many trimpieces, lighting, and glass are unique to the 9-4X.
On that note, I actually came across this 9-4X last weekend. Unfortunately I was driving and couldn’t stop to get more shots.
There’s one in town here that I see every now and again. Still looks good and fresh. Also a neo9-5 sedan.
I’ve had the fortune of seeing several over the years… Boston was always rather saturated with Saabs compared to most other parts of the country. There is a chance it could be this very one I’ve seen several times now with different owners and plates as all but one has been silver.
I didn’t know they existed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_9-4X
Seems like they made 814 of them, in Mexico.
Someone locally has a last-gen 9-5, lovely car but you would worry about spares availability. I remember reading that on the 9-3 wagon, spare tail-lamps are extremely hard to find.
In “A Man Called Ove” , his Volvo driving neighbour eventually defects to BMW but Ove stays loyal to Saab.
Even more than the movie The Man Called Ove, the novel follows the Saab vs Volvo theme in detail that makes it a CC Bookshelf Classic.
https://youtu.be/3QHBoTJP4xk
A friend was a longtime Saab loyalist, owning a sequence of them from his Bay Area days to his move East to his corporate HQ in Washington. Not long before his retirement, his Saab finally went into the “not worth fixing” (or maybe “mechanic doesn’t know how”) stage. By that time there was nothing remotely contemporary in Saab but the shotgun-wedding Saaburu SUV. At that point he went for a real Subaru instead. He still has it, driving it to Washington, the State after his company bought him out into retirement.
e may have wanted to get a Saab badge or two, and put them on his Subaru…and I have looked at the Pick ‘N Pull, but never have seen a Saab there.
I think it says a lot about Saab management’s tone-deafness that the brand was so late to the AWD party. Am not surprised that the 9-5 wagon sold so well; that seemed like a natural for Saab.
It’s too bad someone else didn’t buy Saab. Premium-priced Euro-centric cars were not General Motors’ forte.
Since the topic here is Saab, I’m curious about something much further back in the company’s history. Were the Saab 93/95/96 the first popular front wheel drive cars sold in the US? Setting aside Cord, and even the small number of Citroen DS, Mini’s, DKW’s and Auto Unions sold here in the ‘50’s and early ‘60’s, I can’t think of another FWD car until the Toronado/Eldorado and then Fiat 128, Simca 1100 etc. Am I forgetting something more popular? Sure, the 2 stroke and then V4 Saab’s weren’t ubiquitous, but they sold quite well in California, New England etc. Even as a young kid, I knew about their 2 stroke engines, free-wheeling and front wheel drive.
That’s a good question. How you answer may partly depend upon whether you look narrowly at sales or more broadly at how the car influenced the industry. As a case in point, Jaguar didn’t sell all that many XK-Es in the U.S. but they were one of the most iconic cars of the 1960s.
In 1963 Saab sold a bit more than 5,000 cars in the U.S. whereas Citroen only sold 2,000. That’s according to James Flammang’s Standard Catalog of Imported Cars (which, by the way, is a much better book than Mike Covello’s more recent edition).
My guess is that the Citroen DS had more visibility than the Saab 93/95/96 partly because – oddly enough — it was more mainstream. What I mean is that the DS was a larger, four-door family car from a more prominent automaker.
I wonder whether Saab would have done a lot better in the U.S. during the late-50s and early-60s if it had ditched the two-stroke engine early on. With a more conventional engine, the Saab’s basic design would have been quite competitive against the VW Beetle.
Thanks for the sales number answer. So that’s 2.5:1 in favor of Saab, and it was a cheaper car so perhaps more common in my town (a university town in California, not poor but not many luxury cars). I’d say that my 55 year old memories recall more Volvo’s and MG’s than Peugeot’s, then perhaps Saab’s, with Citroen and Mercedes trailing. I also considered and test drove a used 96 2 stroke for my first car (1973 or ‘74) so it seems less exotic than the large and unsporty Citroen DS (let alone any other 1960’s Citroen).
Dad had a well-worn 1979 900 5-door Turbo, the heart of the Saab quirky years. That car had personality everywhere. Every Saab after that seemed to be a return toward the mean.
I’ll be honest, I have no infatuation with this 9-5. It’s a decent-looking vehicle and kudos to Saab for improving upon the safety structure of the GM platform. However, its uniqueness lies almost solely in the 5-door form factor that didn’t have much presence here. As a performance car, it’s hampered by the FWD architecture. As a luxury car, it’s betrayed by a very cheap interior. Pale homages to the quirky years were carried over, superficially: cockpit night mode, ignition between the seats, weird air vents. A coworker had one of these, post-facelift, in a lovely shade of blue. The seats were good if not-quite-Volvo, but it otherwise felt cheaper than a Mark V Volkswagen.
If we miss the 9-5 wagon, there’s no need to be nostalgic because GM is selling its modern day equivalent in the Regal TourX.
My post a few entries below was meant as a reply to this but I posted it in the wrong place….
The TourX won’t survive beyond this generation. It isn’t selling well and is based on an Opel design, and Opel has since been sold to PSA.
Of all the indignities GM foisted upon Saab, the 2005-2008 Saab 9-7x (based on the Oldsmobile Bravada, which died along with Olds itself in 2004) has to be the most insulting. It was built alongside the Chevrolet TrailBlazer, GMC Envoy, Buick Rainier and Isuzu Ascender in Ohio. Only the difficulty of conjuring up a derogatory moniker for it has kept it from more “recognition.”
Oh, its rarity helps (?), too.
It seemed largely made up of leftover Bravada parts after Olds bit the dust, with a Saab-like front clip and interior trim. It had little Saab “character.”
However it did have the Saab vertical, pop-out-and-deploy cupholder. Made of cheap GM plastic, they tended to break; replacements are still available from esaabparts.com!
Call me weird but I like the 9-7X. Given the popularity of Detroit iron, even trucks and SUV’s, in Sweden it doesn’t seem totally wrong. I still see more on the road than I would expect (though that’s not many, even less than the 9-2X). I have only seen one 9-4X and that’s one too many. To me, that’s the Saab Deadly Sin.
…but the Saab 9-7x was intended, and marketed, primarily for USA sales!
Maybe it was intended to appeal to “liberals, doctors and professor types” from Massachusetts, who wouldn’t think of being seen in a mere Chevrolet.
Great write up! After owning three 9-5s. The first a 00 Aero with 5 speed manual and a 06 2.3t sport and a 04 Arch I bought my kid . I always been impressed with these cars. The first one had it gremlins for sure but the others were pretty reliable. Then I call my self graduating to an
E-Class Mercedes but I found myself missing the Saab. So here we are 2019 I’m back to an 07 9-5 Aero. Reliable car if you can find one. Had to fly out of state to aquire mine. Real leather, cooled and heated and the wonderful sound and thrust of the turbo. My comutes are all smiles once again. There’s no better FWD car in the snow in my opinion.
“Saabs were a thinking person’s premium car”
A true statement, but it defines a unique set of problems. Back in the late eighties Saab ran a commercial explaining why it’s bad to be the thinking person’s car.
The ad stated: “Eighty percent of the people who test drive a Saab, BUY a Saab.”
On first glance, this seems like a positive- Our car is so impressive, everyone who tests drives it buys one!
But this is what it really meant- Our car is so unique and our buyers are so tribal, that we keep selling to the same people and no one else ever comes by.
I’m sure GM figured this out pretty quickly, and made their decisions in an effort to reach out to buyers outside of “Saab World.” They certainly could of done a better job of it, but I’m fairly certain Saab was already a terminal case.
When you were going through the wagons “stats” (cargo room etc) the first thing I thought of was my TourX.
I wonder if any Saab Wagons have been traded for a TourX? (Yes I know its a European wagon at heart.)
I was a big fan of the 99, 900, and 9000 hatchbacks. GM so completely misunderstood Saab’s appeal. They were never quirky for quirky’s sake; rather, “quirky” was just a perceived by-product of Saab’s obsession with practicality. I didn’t like them because they were quirky; I liked them because they had big-car interior and luggage space in a small exterior. I liked how they were built for Swedish winters with FWD, tall thin tires, headlamp washers and wipers, and heated seats long before any of those were common. I liked the panoramic outward visibility. The comfortable chair-height seating. The doors that wrapped below the floor so the sills stay clean. Careful attention to safety and ergonnomics, like defrosters for every window or keeping the radio high in the dash. Little 2.0L or 2.3L turbo fours, later with intercoolers and multivalve setups, that were as smooth as a V6 and powerful as a V8, yet ran on regular unleaded. These sorts of engines are ubiquitous today; they were anything but ubiquitous in the late ’70s and ’80s.
But to GM, Saab was just another set of brand cues to drape over the same basic car, like toppings over a vanilla sundae. Buicks needed their ventiports, Pontiacs their plastic cladding, Cadillacs their vertical blade taillights? Saabs? To GM, they were all about that floor-mounted ignition switch and a model designation that starts with a 9.
At one time, I used to subscribe to the idea that GM somehow ruined Saab. But, if GM hadn’t purchased Saab in the 90’s, Saab would have been dead (probably) by the mid 1990’s. They didn’t have the financial wherewithal to launch a new platform and their cars were getting long in the tooth.
GM did have the platforms and the technologies to propel the brand into the future, the cars that would have been released in the post-2009 time frame would have been stunning. GM used all the platforms at it’s disposal to provide vehicles that were market appropriate. I know that some folks were pining for a return to a 99 EMS style of car, but the rest of the world had moved on.
That said, I still would love a Viggen in my garage. Or a 9-3 Turbo X. Or the last 9-5 sedan.
But like my love for Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles and (some) Saturns, my Saab desires will go unabated.
Really have no experience with Saab. Can’t say I’ve ever ridden in one, or knew anyone that owned one. That said, there’s always been a fair number around, and I’ve always kinda liked them, especially when I was young; as I got older the the idea of the “Saab image” did not appeal to me. I do recall seeing in the early-‘90s what I guess was a ‘70s 900 2-door; but rather than the popular alloy wheels, it had steelies and factory poverty caps, I liked that look.
Being in the car biz, I go to the local annual car show, mainly for the manufacturers’ breakfast. The last one I attended strictly for pleasure was 2008. I remember being disappointed with the ubiquitousness of the “cockpit seating” arrangement in nearly every car. I spent hours looking over and sitting in a myriad of cars. My favorite all-around? A Mercury Grand Marquis. Loved that couch up front. My second favorite car? A Saab 9-5. The driver’s seating arrangement was better than all others, except the Mercury.
A very pleasant read, Brendan. Thank you.
Growing up my neighbor had a red 1987 900s red she drove thst well in to 2000, i said one day i going to get me a Saab my first Saab 1998 900s black awsome loved it! A truck carrying BMW to the dealer, ripped down the driver side from the back to the front bumper totaled.I went on a search and found a 2003 convertible love it even more had since 2009. I would love the last year they made them but hard to find.
Except for a handful made after yet another last-gasp ownership change, the last model year was 2011. In approaching my very recent purchase of a 2008 Saab convertible, I considered other, sometimes newer, examples and test-drove a few. There were a few 2011 models for sale with what seemed to me to be excessive asking prices; one dealer wanted (and eventually got, from someone else) nearly $15,000 for a 57K-mile car with neither the Winter Package nor the Premium Package; that is, a truly ordinary example.
Production numbers fell off drastically after the 2008 revision, and so did the variety of colors. By 2011 the large majority were black, silver, white, or gray. Mechanically and in outward appearance, there was no real change from 2008 to 2011, except for badging (by 2010 “Aero” no longer gave you a six-cylinder motor, and the 2.0T designation became “Turbo4”).
I chose a low-mileage car that was in a garage with a cover every winter, and well maintained when in use. I think I got a much fairer deal than if I had specifically shopped for a 2011.
I’d wager I’m the most experienced SAAB-ist here, from a used ’67 96 3 cyl in 1971, a new ’73 99 2 yrs later, 5 x C900s (’78/9 to ’93/4) 900s, 2 x 9000s, 2 x 1st Gen (OG) 9-3s, 1 ’01 Aero 9-5, and lastly a ’07 NG 9-3 SportCombi. Loved every one of them. 9-5s got considerably less finicky after around ’04, and NG 9-3s after ’06 though soft valves from a bad (German) parts supplier can plague some of the latter. We still have an ’84 900T, ’87 900, 2 of our favorites, a ’99 9-3, and the ’07 wagon, and would dearly love a 2011 9-5, however the parts situation precludes one of those. A great car, and sorely missed… RIP.