Too old, too expensive, too slow, too heavy, too thirsty but Jeroen Ekeler embraced the Saab 90

Dogs of different breeds can produce the cutest mongrels together – leave that to Mother Nature. She carefully avoids incorrect combinations (cow with zebra, mosquito with elephant) in that process.

Saab 99 and 900 made love baby

Forced, unnatural reproduction does sometimes occur in cars. Like that time when Saab put the 99 and 900 models out to pasture together: the elderly mare and the young stallion. The result was a bit of a shock, because the newborn had the grooved face of the mother, who was born in the 1960s, and the otherwise young body of the father, a child from the 1980s. It turned out to be an emergency step. Saab simply had no other mutation material available. Difficult, because it desperately wanted to replace the discontinued 99 with another affordable model. The Saab 600, a renumbered Lancia Delta, briefly played that role, but the Swedish buyers politely turned their noses up at it. Then just make do with what Saab had left: merge the nose of the 99 with the body of the 900. That is still better than nothing. Better also than the alternative, which was also placed in the maternity room: the nose of a 900 on the abdomen of a 99.

Now the final Saab 90 was not a beauty either. From the side I think it looks like a joke for a New Year’s card: the nose on the old year’s side, the butt on the new one. And wasn’t there a dotted line between those two halves? With those scissors? No, the 90’s was real. And I embraced him from the start, like a child hugging a new, immediately favorite teddy bear. I ignored the sober but justified comments in the car tests at the time: too old, too expensive, too slow, too heavy, too thirsty. Food for non-Saab people. The others. I actually love old Saabs, despite the problems I had with my 900i a long time ago. I prefer to think back to the concrete road holding, the safe doors, the hissing of the ventilation buttons, the soft whistling of the transmission, the green dashboard lighting and the countless other, often invisible details. They fascinated me when I read the voluminous Saab brochures as a boy. Correctly conceived and properly built was the priority. Something like that may look quite special. Gladly even.