LA Preview: Saab Celebrates 25 Years with a Special Edition 9-3 Convertible

Saab celebrates 25 years of making cars that look exactly the same as each other by making a car that looks like all the other cars they've made? How original of them.

Okay...enough GM(and Ford for that matter)...the government needs to give the bailout money to the employees and let the companies go under...

After 20/30 years no lessons have been learned....way to go american car companies!!!!!

Can Saab still stop the rot, can they get rid-off the malicious genes that embedded themselves in the Saab DNA?

Can Opel/Saab go on by themselves and give GM-US 1b for the 'honour'?

I have always had a little place in my heart for Saab's quirky designs. These new generation Saab's sure look a lot better, even more so than the last 5-6 years. I really hope GM sells them so they can break free from the bureaucratic bs, and make the cars they want to make, not what GM wants them to make.

@gilly

I completely agree. The bailout package should go towards the employees of GM, and not the rotten shit-worth company that GM has become. GM needs to sell to the highest bidder, get rid of their retarded name and brands (not their aquisitions) and start all over.

-jOSH

Employees are the ones making bank and driving the industry down with all the union crap. If it goes to the employees it should also have a pink slip attached and an officer pointing to the nearest exit.

With such high salaries as a company you cant afford to develop low budget small cars because you can't make money off of it. You need big cars with larger price tags. But you can't do that either with the current economic conditions.

The small cheap cars have to be imported from Mexico, but then you get the quality of a south of the border worker which doesn't help your sales because no one wants to buy a lemon.

Its a no win scenario until they can get operating costs down.

I say let them go bankrupt so they can learn a lesson and make better cars...

You have a small car. You sell that small car to your dealers for about 10 grand. $1500 of that 10 grand goes to health care for your employees, before labor costs, upkeep costs, pensions, materials, etc etc. You have already cut your profit by 15% thanks to unions before you have even made the car, gotten the materials to make it, paid the power bill, etc etc.

How can you make a small car like that and turn a profit? Simple, you can't.

And just real quick, for comparison, Toyota would have only lost 2.5% for health care on that same 10 grand vehicle. Who can afford to make a better small car?

The failure of GM is half a lack of vision and half a lack of guts. The union contracts eliminated their margins, so accountants were put to work designing cars which became sorry -least common denominator- products, which drove down their values, leading to lower margins, huge discounts and a wasting away of any innovation resources they might have had. It was a company coasting on the inertia of past success, slipping into a death spiral of falling value, and has finally been dealt the double blow of fuel prices and lack of credit, the agony of which I believe a government bailout can only drag out for years more.