This is a story about a motoring brand that ended in tragedy. Saab Automobile started out in 1945 in Sweden. It started when Saab AB (Saab Automobiles parent company established 1937) decided it would make a car, this was a little bit of a curve ball because the company was known for its military and aerospace company, and still is. They came up with the Saab 92, which was released in 1949. Nothing too substantial happened until they merged with Scania, the famous lorry/truck company. Ten years after the merger they released the Saab 900, which was a great success, and became the highest selling model at the time.
Saab Automobile and Scania became independent brands under the Saab AB umbrella, and GM became interested in the Saab Automobile half, they purchased 50% of the company for $600million (a shed load of money in 1990). In 2000, GM purchased the other 50%, and at that point owned the whole company. Saab was a niche brand representing its aerospace pedigree, they were predominantly sold to architects. It wasn't a brand of car that anyone would buy - like a Volkswagen - this may seem cool, but it was not great for GM's profit. Saab was spending a lot of money on the engineering of the cars, meaning it was barely scraping by. GM gave Saab an ultimatum, they supplied Saab with Vauxhall's and effectively told them to rebody them and sell them to help with the money problem. The problem with this is the fact that Saab paid 0 interest in this ultimatum, they were using the Vauxhall base, but they just carried on over-engineering everything. When GM checked up on how Saab were doing, they found out that the new Saab shared very little with the Vauxhall in which it was based on, Saab had even designed and built its own SatNav for the car (god knows how much developing that cost). As you can probably tell, this pissed GM off, so they decided to sell Saab. The money to buy Saab came from an unlikely place, Spyker (the Dutch nutty supercar brand). However, after trying to save Saab from the brink for two years it had finally gone under, bankrupt. There is some slightly good news as they National Electric Vehicle Sweden purchased the bankrupt estate and have been making electric versions of Saab's ever since under the brand NEVS.
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