The Saab Network Now Mailing List FAQ | |
|
[ Prev by Date ] [ Next by Date ] Member Login / Signup - Members see fewer ads. - Latest Member Gallery Photos
Goodbye from Saab?
Posted by Bjorn & Corinna Breitzke (more from Bjorn & Corinna Breitzke) on Tue, 16 Nov 1999 09:40:20
After almost 30 years of Saab life i recently sold my Saab 900i 16v and bought an Opel Zafira mini van. Now, here's why, it may will be of interest for some of you:
When my father bought his first 99 GL back in 1974 i was 9 years old and absolutely enthusiastic. I loved the ruggedness of the design, the way of doing things and solving problems in another way than the others. We lived in Germany, near the Danish border then and took out on vaccation every summer to Norway and Sweden. We visited the factory in Trollhättan and i was enchanted by all the Robots doing their work so elegantly. I travelled many thousands of kilometres on the back seat and fell asleep listening to the sound of that engine.
Then we got a 900 GL in 1981 and this was the first car i drove, with all the memories attached to that privilege. Which i had to fight for every time. Then my father bought a 9000i CC and i moved to Copenhagen for studies. The first thing i saved up for was an 11 years old 99 GL that rusted like hell, but it was mine! I still absoutely loved those cars and bought a used 900 GL in 1991 which i kept a long time. We got married and that Saab carried the sign 'Just married'. Two years later we were driving my first son home from hospital.
But Saab had changed now. The new models had not that swedish ruggedness and the special appearence anymore, that i loved so much. They started to look like the other cars, though adressing the high price luxury car market more and more and turning down their image of the swedish folk car. Since i could not afford 45 k$ (including the crazy danish car registration tax of 180%, yes, 180%) i bought one of the last 'real' 900. Again there was this feeling of safety, of sweedish overengineering that carried me back to those days when sitting on the back seat of that 99 CC, feeling so safe watching the Swedish landscape rush by and slowly falling asleep.
Now we got our 2. son, and i had to face the fact, that with all the toddler accessories with us, the car with its 1974 design got too small when taking out on vaccation. The 9-3 offered not significantly more space, so we looked at the 9-5 Estate. The base model without ACC and Al wheels (probably not even sellable in the US) costed about 60 k$. So we looked away again. The most other estate cars were bigger and cheaper and we looked at the new Opel (GM) Zafira which could load more ccm and more kg than the 9-5 or carry 7 people. I realized, that this was the right family car so i ordered it and sold my 900i 16v with all the accessories which my father and i had collected for so many years. I sold it to a very friendly policeman who is still happy about the car.
When he drove away from the driveway i had tears in my eyes, facing that my Saab era now had gone. But i put a question mark at the subject line and i am staying in the TSN. For maybe, some day, when my sons are grown i will buy a (then) vintage Saab, maybe just like the one i sold.
Thanks for all that Saab'ing, Bjorn Breitzke
Posts in this Thread:
StateOfNine.com
![](/tsn/xyz/stateofninebutton.gif) |
SaabClub.com
![](/tsn/xyz/scnabutton.gif) |
Jak Stoll Performance
![](/tsn/xyz/jakstollbutton.gif) |
M Car Covers
![](/tsn/xyz/mcarcoversbutton.gif) |
Ad Available
![](/tsn/xyz/buttonavailable.gif) |
![](/tsn/images/tsnmap.gif)
This is a moderated FAQ - Posting is a privilege, not a right.
Unsolicited commercial postings are not allowed (no Spam). Please, no For Sale or Wanted postings, SERIOUSLY.
Classifieds are to be listed in The Saab Network Classifieds pages.
This is a problem solving forum for over 250,000 Saab owners, so expect to see
problems discussed here even though our cars are generally very reliable. This is not an anything goes
type of forum. TSN has been a moderated forum since 1988. For usage guidelines, see the
TSN Mission and Purpose Page. Please remember that you are
not anonymous Your address is: 3.149.28.134 - Using Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com) - Logged.
|