Crédit photo: courtoisie

SAAB

Saab is a brand of automobiles produced in Sweden that first emerged in 1945 as an offshoot of Saab AB, a manufacturer of military technology and aerospace systems. Based in Trollhattan, a Swedish city, Saab continues to produce cars today, and is now owned by a company called National Electric Vehicle Sweden, or Nevs for short.

Saab’s first market-ready vehicle, the uniquely styled Saab 92, was introduced in 1949 and remained in production until 1956.

By the 1980s, Saab had become a popular mass-market car in North America and Europe, leading to elevated interest in the brand among investors and competing car manufacturers. American company General Motors purchased a fifty percent stake in Saab in 1989, and ultimately purchased the rest of the company in 2000. Following the financial crisis of 2008-09, GM relinquished ownership of Saab to a Netherlands-based car maker, Spyker N.V., in 2010. The next three years saw Saab declare bankruptcy, and be acquired by Nevs in 2012; Nevs, in turn, declared bankruptcy in 2014.

Saab’s name stands for “Svenska Aeroplan AB”, which means “Swedish Airplane Corporation” in Swedish. In the 1960s Saab began exporting cars to markets around the world for the first time, starting with the Saab 96 model. A merger with a fellow Swedish producer of commercial-grade cars and trucks, Scania-Vabis, was completed by 1970 and resulted in a slew of new designs and engineering modifications for future Saab car models. A partnership with Fiat also contributed to new vehicles and a standards-based engineering approach that precipitated the creation of several new cars, including the Alfa Romeo 164.

GM-designed Saab models did not perform as well as anticipated, and by the end of the 2000s General Motors was considering the possibility of a sale of the brand to one of several interested parties. Failed acquisition attempts and various lawsuits followed after GM did not consent to the sale of Saab to a Chinese auto manufacturer, citing concerns for General Motors shareholders.
By 2015, various state-owned Chinese companies entered into a deal to purchase the now-bankrupt Nevs company and begin producing a new brand of electric cars domestically in China.