I do love the Swedish brand SAAB already for a long time. Beginning of the 80’s my parents switched from Citroën to SAAB and I have always felt more safe in a SAAB. That is one of the reasons I still drive SAAB although production is stopped already years ago and no new car will ever have the name SAAB on it.
Why SAAB
Since my parents drive SAAB and I was old enough to go to scouting by myself (on a bike) I usually stopped by the SAAB dealer on my way back home. Taking a look at the cars, have some small talks with the garage holder and grab some new folders. Once in a while when my parents might consider a new car I could directly tell which are available. But loving the SAAB models and reading the folders I felt there is more behind just a car. It is a safe car and everything seems to be thought through.
Current cars
At the moment we have three SAAB’s. My first SAAB a model 96 with a V4 engine. It is a model year 1974, but looking as a model year 1979. In the post Our SAAB 96 V4 you will find more details about the changes. Then we have a model 900 with the low pressure turbo engine. It is a model year 1993, so it is one of last classic SAAB’s. In the post Our SAAB 900S you can read more about this car. And the last one is a model 9-5ng, where ng stand for new generation which means it is one of the last SAAB’s. It has the twin turbo diesel (TTID) engine and it is model year 2011. You can read more about this SAAB in the post Our SAAB 9-5ng and why did we bought this specific one.
Cars we have had
- After my first car the SAAB 96 I bought a Saab 900 Turbo 2.0T “Silver Arrow” in 2000. The Silver Arrow was a limited edition for the Dutch market. It was a 2-door model and it had the 8-valve full turbo engine. It was only available in 1986 and only in the color Silver off course. It had also a wooden steering wheel and wooden shifter.
- After a year, thus 2001 I felt in love with a SAAB 9000CD 2.3Turbo automatic. Same car which my parents drove for a couple of months. Since the first time my parents bought a SAAB 9000 I was in love with this model. You have so much space in it and still it was built for the driver. So a big fast SAAB from model year 1991, the first year of this engine.
- In 2006 Sandra and I started to live together and since Sandra was from the other side of our small country we started to drive a lot more. And thus the 9000 was replaced by a much younger SAAB 9-3se 2.0lpt automatic. This one was mostly running on LPG, so a lot cheaper than the 9000. It looks great and I love the night panel (only showing the speedometer at night) feature SAAB had introduced.
- In the meantime Sandra got her driving license and that means we needed another car. Of course I wanted a SAAB, so we ended with a simple but great 900s 2.0i from model year 1997.
- However running on LPG brings more costs on repair and so I started looking for a diesel. We also moved to a new home and all our childeren went to a school at the end of our street. So both the 9-3 and 900 were replaced by SAAB 9-5 Linear 2.2 TID automatic. A great car although it had some issues with the caravan driving mountains in Czech Republic, but with Hirsch tuning that problem was solved. It was a model year 2005, so the last of the original model. And it was a problem free car. However it did not have a diesel particle filter (which gave a great km/l) and so we started to have issues with cities that had environment restrictions. That and my love for the last SAAB 9-5 model were reasons to sold this one and by our current SAAB 9-5ng.
- With kids starting to grow and need to bring them to hobbies and swimming lessons we learned that having one daily driver was not the best choice. So we bought a Skoda Felicia 1.6. It was cheap and easy in the city. However after a while and some winters it did not felt right for not having a safe SAAB. So the Skoda went replaced by the current SAAB 900.