Saab - victim of its times

So it's going. The last of the tentative offers for SAAB, the Swedish car company, has fizzled out and it will be put into liquidation.

The thing about SAABs was that they were oddball. The early ones had two stroke engines, when nobody else was doing that. The cars won rallies with three cylinder engined vehicles which had peculiar shapes: SAAB was the first company to concentrate on aerodynamics and in the sixties was producing cars of a sufficiently low aerodynamic coefficient even for today's market.

Many people remember the SAAB 99 manufactured from the sixties to the mid eighties. SAAB for a while in those days was the only manufacturer using turbochargers, now common across all ranges of car. And finally SAAB was the first to offer a range of safety features. The cars felt safe and solid.

And they were odd: from the floor based ignition key which you couldn't get out unless the handbrake was on, to the company's ignoring of 0-60 times, then an obsession among car manufacturers, on the grounds that the customers weren't really interested, they were more concerned about mid-range acceleration, overtaking.

Then in 1989 General Motors took over. SAAB was a victim of its times because it was cheaper for GM to buy a going concern than to expand its market organically. Inevitably the cars, now Opel Vectras with a different badge, became less quirky, less interesting. GM was only interested in selling Vectra platforms; it never made a success of the operation and now it is dead.

I've driven a few SAABs and can't help regretting the passing of perhaps the last interesting car make. But I suppose it couldn't have continued. Hey-ho.