Date: Fri, 03 Sep 1999 09:38:45 -0600 From: Thant Tessman <thantnopsamorg> Subject: Re: What's the story with the 9-3?
fleetfootnjnopsameja.com wrote: > I'm about to pull the trigger on what seems to be > an excellent '99 close-out lease deal on the 9-3. I've owned my base model 9-3 four-door hatchback for about 200 miles, so I can't give you much feedback on long-term reliability. And mine's a manual. I needed a five-seater, but I'm coming from a two-seater sports car so I wanted to find something whose power and handling wouldn't make me lament for my old car. The nine cubed does the job. The handling is great. It has that european-car feeling where you don't tell it to turn, you just ask it to turn, or even just casually think about turning, and it will turn. I'm told by "car" friends that American cars deliberately tone down or even avoid that kind of feel from a car because it scares some people. As for the power, it has plenty, but only when the turbo kicks in. My sports car had less power to weight, but the power was far more...um...reliably available. Keep in mind this is my first turbo. Maybe I'm just not used to it yet. I also test-drove the HOT version, but I couldn't tell enough of a difference in power to justify paying for a bunch of leather I didn't want. One thing I learned that really improved my control over the car: There's a meter in the instrument panel that tells you what the turbo boost pressure is. Ignore it. Don't stare at it trying to figure out what hell the car has on its little silicon mind. Just drive. The seats are comfy. The cargo space is great. The car feels solid. The interior is quiet. I'm not used to "near-luxury" cars with electric sunroofs, and heated rear-view mirrors, and headlight washer/wipers, and trip computers that tell you when your gas cap isn't on tight enough, and heated butt warmers, and leather pouches for the manual, and retracting antennas, and remote controls that make it go "blip blip" when you lock it, and other such silliness, but I suppose I'll get used to it. (I've never confirmed that the little windshield wipers on the headlights actually do anything. Maybe they're like those little plastic cell-phone antennas you can buy and stick on your car that don't really do anything, but make you look more important.) Annoyances: * Top on the list is the stereo. It's extremely weak. The treble and midrange is thin and strained. What little bass there is sounds like it's coming from the inside of a quaker oatmeal container stored in the trunk. There are two empty speaker grilles in the front doors. There's a $500 factory upgrade that'll put speakers in there, but I suspect my money is better spent somewhere else. * The rear windshield wiper has a mind of its own. * The "daytime running lights" were annoying, but there's a fuse you can remove to turn them off. * There's the image associated with Saab of being a pipe-smoking midbrow intellectual twit. "Snaab: The Car for People who Don't Like Cars." But at least the nine cubed isn't as butt-ugly as the 900. In fact, I kinda decided I liked its looks as soon as I got it through my head that I wasn't gonna be buying an Audi TT any time soon. * The remote (key fobble?) is WAY too big. I took it apart to see if there was a reason it was that big, and of course there wasn't. It was just "overstyled." Hell, even the regular key has this monsterous plastic bulb on the end. Strangely, the fact that the ignition switch isn't on the dashboard doesn't bother me. Yeah it was a little hard to get used to at first, as was switching into reverse to turn off the engine, but now other cars seem weierd. * And of course there's the fucking up-shift light. But overall, I'm VERY happy with it. It's a nice car. I'm eagerly awaiting the experience of driving it in the snow. (Well, not really.) -thant
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