The whole point of concept cars is that they should point to the future. That's all very optimistic at that moment, but what if the brand has no future at all? Then it seems a bit like everyone has been spending their time on the wrong things, doesn't it? In the case of Saab, if some later models had looked a little more like this 2001 concept car, things might have been a little brighter.
The Saab 9-X was unveiled at the IAA in Frankfurt in September 2001. It was groundbreaking – or at least that was what the press release said. Not a good idea, because you just need jobs, as a company. Apparently only photos of the Smart Roadster were pinned to the mood board in the design studio, but its makers insisted that the Saab 9-X was a 'four-dimensional car' that 'broke with all conventions'.
The Saab 9-X is a coupe, roadster and pickup in one
Anyway: for a coupe, the 9-X was basically quite normal. 2+2 seats, windows, the usual. The roof panels could be removed targa-style to create a roadster of sorts, and you could fold the rear seats down to pretend it was a station wagon; or leave the tailgate open and imagine a pickup truck.
It had a bit of an air about it of something they sell in those gadget stores in a mall to pull middle-aged men out of their depression. It was powered by a fancy aluminum 3.0-liter turbo V6 that sent 300 horsepower to all four wheels. The gearbox was a manual six-speed and the Saab 9-X stood on 19-inch wheels, which we would now find ridiculously small.
What the Saab 9-X was supposed to represent
The German car designer Michael Mauer was the boss of the box of crayons at Saab at the time. “The 9-X shows that the traditional way of classifying cars is dead,” he said of the car at the time. He then moved to Porsche, where he supervised a few more cars that did not wish to conform to traditional classifications, such as the Cayenne and the Panamera.
“He is a signal pole to the future – he shows where Saab is going.” Michael Mauer again. Unfortunately, it didn't show exactly where Saab was going, because then it would have looked more like a slightly retouched Chevrolet TrailBlazer, somewhere in the back of a junkyard. He showed where Saab could have gone if General Motors had not made such a huge mess of the company.
The tragic reality was that the Saab 9-X looked ahead to a future where the company no longer existed. Just try to incorporate that into a concept car. In 2010, GM sold Saab to Spyker, which juggled its shaky finances for two years and then sold the contents to a Chinese consortium that spent another two years building nothing before disappearing altogether in 2014. A sad story that could have ended differently…
#Saab #build #car #cool