but GM let Saab die…
today, SAAB is alive but only by the distant threat of a changing deal…
in my reading, i found this article by Jack Baruth called: Lexus killed Saab, but GM let Saab die.
it touched a nerve, and i found the last 2 paragraphcs particularly poinient and relevant to the fealings i’ve been wrestling with in my head all weekend…
“I have a bit of a fantasy, as a former Saab owner and unrepentant fan of the old cars. I dream that Saab comes roaring back under some daring little ownership umbrella, freed to somehow create world-class product on a shoestring and humiliate the Japanese juggernauts on the open road. I close my eyes and hope for a stunning new car that has the spirit of that old 99 Turbo and brings the old virtues to a generation not even alive when the only two turbo cars on the market were the Saab and the Porsche 930. I think of the Saab workers, earning a decent wage and building cars they love, a bulwark against the vomitous tide of look-alike crap from the Pacific Rim, the Asian Tigers, and eventually the open maw of China. I can think about this, and I can smile.
And then I open my eyes to see a Hyundai Genesis gliding by, more Lexus than Lexus, more fake than the original fakers, yet honest and real in the same way the Lexus ES is honest and real. That’s the future. Luxury was always an illusion. Now it is deliberately so. To imagine that future, if I may paraphrase Orwell, imagine a Chinese-made faux-Ferragamo boot stomping on a human face. Plastic chrome, meaningless names, flowery symbols. This is the future, and in that future, Saab is, inexorably and completely, dead.”