Okay, Saab, it's time to declare a time of death...

While many people won’t blink at the news of Saab’s bankruptcy, it’s a sad occasion for many others. The Swedish auto maker did have fans, after all, especially among drivers who appreciated its design and engineering innovations — and its proverbial quirkiness.

And in the absence of Citroen, Peugeot, Lancia and other eccentric brands that have left the U.S. over the years, the loss of Saab seems to mark the end of quirkiness in the car market.

Over the past 10 years or so even Saabs became conformist, looking and driving more like other cars. Indeed, recent Saab 9-3 sport sedans were arguably Chevrolet Malibus in disguise. The company was a unit of General Motors by then.

But from the brand’s earliest models of the 1950s through the 1990s, getting into a Saab was a departure from everyday autodom.

Their tall, flat dashboards resemble an airplane’s instrument panel and large windshields with exaggerated curves gave their interiors an open, airy feel. Mechanically, Saabs were oddballs. Sometimes it seemed as if their designers hadn’t bothered to look at how other car companies were doing it.

The car company was originally a unit of airplane maker Svenska Aeroplan Aktie Bologet, which built planes for Sweden’s air force. Its vehicles were known for their streamlined bodies and innovations from safety belts and energy-absorbing crumple zones to turbocharged engines.

By the 1980s the Saab 900 and 900 Turbo models rivaled high-end brands like BMW and Mercedes-Benz in the battle for parking spaces in preppy suburban garages. But while those companies continued to grow, Saab lost momentum and fell off the retail radar screens of most car shoppers over the last decade. The bottom line: they just didn’t have the resources to create vehicles of enough demand to justify continually bringing out new vehicles so they weren’t competitive. 

Recently there was much talk of a Chinese savior for Saab and, indeed, a Chinese company had made motions to buy the company but General Motors put the kaibash on that. You see, GM has a lot at stake at Saab, having saved the company’s sorry ass when it was hurting years ago. 

While looking at its businesses throughout the world GM decided that there was no real benefit to losing millions on Saabs. While some might argue that Saabs didn’t have the personality of earlier models, the reality is that most car buyers aren’t going to favor quirky cars and there are only so many weirdos around the world onto which you can pawn a weird card. The number of dorks who might buy Saabs is not divisible by any realistic number when you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars to bring a new vehicle to market. 

Sure, it used to be possible to create a business plan based on selling a few hundred thousand vehicles per year but today you have to sell many hundreds of thousands of vehicles per year to break even and even more to earn a profit. 

Folks who worked at Saab after GM took over admitted that being under the corporate umbrella enabled them to get their hands on terrific global platforms and have much more leverage with suppliers which meant better quality parts. The GM move was a good one then and killing off the brand is a logical move now. Yes, we’re sad to see Saab go, but not surprised. It’s just not a sustainable business model. Times and the reality of the car business have changed dramatically. 

I can also easily see GM’s side in this. A Chinese company wants to buy Saab, a money-losing proposition altogether. Saabs are basically Swedish version of GM’s global vehicles. Guess where GM also sells a lot of versions of its global platforms? In China with a Buick label on them. So, a Chinese investor could easily mine the company’s “secret sauce” and create a product that would put a real hurt on Buick, a popular brand in China. 

Remember, the Chinese have no qualms about copying others’ hard work so if I were GM, I would also tell Saab’s Chinese investors to go jump in a polluted lake. 

Bottom line - cars will get more and more similar over time. For those who want quirky, maybe a used Saab might be the ticket but it’s not likely you’re going to see any new ones anytime soon.