Swedish icon goes Dutch

ANSWER the following question honestly: would you buy a Saab?

Yep, I probably would as well, but today a Dutch businessman has taken his enthusiasm for the beleaguered luxury car brand to new extremes. He didn’t buy a Saab. He bought Saab. The whole company.

Victor Muller’s successful bid to snatch a Swedish icon from General Motors is no guarantee that the guys from Gothenburg are any safer in their jobs, but it does at last mean that Saab is no longer constrained by a bigger carmaker which is crippled by losses. It’s constrained by a smaller carmaker which is crippled by losses.

Spyker, Mr Muller’s other car company, is one of those boutique supercar brands which sells to a select few connoisseurs every year; it’s not a BMW competitor with more than 3,000 employees on its books.

It’s about as mad as Morgan putting in a bid for Mercedes-Benz, but already I’m hoping those crazy, sexy Dutch can make Saab work where America’s biggest car firm couldn’t. Even if the odds of one of motoring’s minnows succeeding is slim to ridiculous, I get the feeling Spyker understands what makes Saab buyers tick (and it isn’t thinly-disguised Vauxhall Vectras with “jet fighter” styling).

The new 9-5 looks hugely promising, but in order to buy one you’d have to overlook anything not only from homegrown rivals Volvo, but the finest from Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Jaguar and Lexus too. Would you buy one over an XF? That’s a trickier question.

Saab should be about as attractively Swedish as IKEA tables or Agnetha from ABBA, but it hasn’t produced anything genuinely Scandinavian since it stopped making the original 900. It has so many icons and so much heritage it can draw on – some of which is genuinely linked to jet fighters – that it really ought to rise again.

My money’s on a retro revisit of the quirky and rally-winningly quick 96 from the ‘60s; can you imagine picking a Volvo C30 over that? Or how about a proper Saab Turbo for once? The possibilities are endless.

I think Mr Muller’s probably a little bit mad, but he’s exactly what Saab needs. That and a tasty grant from a generous backer, of course…