Trollhattan Saab has changed!
The site you're viewing now is the original Trollhattan Saab weblog, though it's now an archive only and no new material is posted here. As of February 2009, all new material is posted at our new site - Saabs United.
Please join us at Saabs United and get your daily Saab fix from Saab sources all around the world.

With so much going on leading up to the unveiling of the new 9-5 at Frankfurt, I though it might help to have a summary page with all the entries leading up to the big event. So here we go, from the beginning:

The first entry here featured a white 9-5 spotted in the streets of Trollhattan. It was widely panned as being too ‘Toyota Camry’.

Photo: Hans G Lehmann

The next entry featured two cameraphone pictures from the assembly line. These were actually the first pics seen anywhere, but weren’t picked up on this site. There were also a couple of shots from a distance in the snow. Again, these did little to inspire the masses. The full entry is here.

The third entry featured the black rear end of a 1.9TiD 9-5 in Sweden. The rear lights had the elusive magic tape in place, but that didn’t prevent the clear as day picture from being snapped and circulated. The entire entry is here.

This next entry was the first of the ’spyshots’ to provide some hope in my opinion. The silver 9-5 that was whited out around the outside gave the first impressions of a new facelifted model with some agro character. The entry was also the first insight into the interior, a picture that photoshopped to kingdom-come, but turned out to be truer than we could believe. Read the full entry here.

In a return to the scary ‘Camry’ shot from earlier, there was this picture of the rear-end, this time sans-tape.

The next entry in the series was the first of the famed ‘Djup Strupe’ shots (my nickname for Trollhattan’s Saab insider). Again, from a cameraphone, these were the clearest shots seen at the time of the front end of the car. The full story is here.

Spy Stories III was another post based on photos by Djup Strupe. This post featured the interior and new shots of the rear-end, including the wagon. The full post is here

Saab 9-5’s were being spotted all over the place by this point and web magazines the world over were publishing all they could. A few shots like the one below appear when you click here

And yet again, when you click here

The first official pics started to appear around the end of August. Autoblog even posted a rumour that they were leaked by a staffer as a protest to the styling. Nothing is known about the truth in that story, but it certainly seems as if Saab’s hand was tipped before GM were ready. This was the first official picture and it was followed by more here, here and here.