I spend a reasonable amount of my time pointing out the mistakes of motoring journalists when it comes to Saab so it’s only fair when my mistakes get pointed out too. The difference may lay in the fact that I’m accountable to you, the readership here, and I’ll admit and explain my mistakes. The others: not so much.
It would appear that the image I published last night was, in some ways, not genuine. Let me explain.
I believe quite wholeheartedly that the image I published is in use around Geneva – if not now then in the near future – to publicise the premiere of Saab’s new concept car to be shown there next month. I’m quite satisfied that in that regard, it’s genuine. I know and trust the source who sent it to me and the copy for the image ties in with recent advertising in the area, published last week here on the site.
So where did I go wrong?
When I received the image I went to the GM Media archives and pulled a profile shot of the Saab 9x concept car for comparative purposes. This is the image that I pulled. It’s the first profile shot of the 9x that appears in the archives and it appears on the fourth page of the image archives for the Saab 9x.
If I’d proceeded further into the archives (images are shown 8 at a time) I would have seen the following on the eighth and final page:
So it seems GM Media had two different images of the Saab 9x in the archives. The first one that appears in the archive, the one I assumed was a genuine image of the Saab 9x, is the one I used and as you can see, it’s different from the second one in some key areas – most notably the front overhang.
It appears that someone preparing this publicity piece for the show has used the second image, which I didn’t get to in my search, and added the cloth cover to it.
I did my homework, it’s just that I didn’t do enough of it.
As mentioned, I believe this to be a genuine image in terms of it’s use prior to the show, but the similarities between it and the car we’ll see next month will have to be examined at that time. Given Saab’s own use of the 9x in previous imagery it could well be that they’re going “concept-retro” and reclaiming the design heritage that they were forced to abandon back in 2002.
Regardless of all this, next month is looking to be very exciting.
Q: Why is there two different cars on imagesthat are supposed to be of the 9x? Has there been more than one concept of the 9x? If not, why the second one? Did it end up there by mistake since it just one of the CGIs from the development of the 9x? Or is that in fact the new 9-1 concept?
Good question, ctm. It may be that the one I used was a concept drawing in the design stages of the car and the second one is the finished product. It was too late at night for me to tell the difference quickly and I never got to the second image to see the difference.
Bottom line, though, I should have known the car well enough to spot it straight away. I knew the wheels in the image I posted were retro, but given Saab’s own linking of this car to the 9x in their previous shot, I figured it was a distinct possibility that they might use them again. Maybe they will….
Swade, you did your homework very well. Untill your previous entry and the following comments, i believe no-one except the saab designers themselve new of the different 9-X fronts.
Or, how clever of saab to build in 2 different overhangs, back then in 2001, so we have somthing to move our mind and kill time until Geneva 2008 …
Maybe your Djup is connected to mr. Maurer, who’s the one fooling us here and meanwhile preparing the ressurection of his old – but good – design. Just kidding.
What makes the 9-1 preview convicing somehow is the use of German text ‘Differenz’, which indeed was used in the previous showed ads. On the other hand, adding or copying a text is even easier than photoshopping it.
Swade, I think you are correct. The 2nd image appears to be an earlier sketch while the 1st appears to be the actually 9X. Either way I suspect there will be alot of the 9-X in the new car, hopefully the rear hatch design.
It looks like marketing are using the 9x as an expedient way to build interest without giving anything away. Given that the 9x is still popular amongst Saabists and relatively unknown by everyone else, they can get away with it. In any case, anybody who wants to bash Saab for this promo don’t have much time before Geneva.
Clearly no one can trust you any further Swade!!!
I love you too, hotpants – SW
Wilfried, I’ve had people try and fake a Djup Strupe notification before, so I’m quite careful with screening the sources nowadays. This came from a source I’ve communicated with privately several times in the past, hence my trust in the source and belief that this is a genuine document to be used for pre-publicity for the show. As Turbin suggests @ comment 6, it looks as if they’re using the 9x to build interest.
The first is just a cgi, and the second the actual concept.
Just like we saw the 9-3 restyling cgi first, and then the real car was a bit different, I guess..
I hope the version shown has more of a duck tail rear giving a nod to the c900. But I’m not holding my breath.
I’m quite fond of the second version — and it seems it would be easy enough to do the Aero X treatment on the front end.
The 9x was awesome – they couldn’t do much better for the design of the 9-1 than to go back to that.
More questions to move our minds untill Geneva or swade himself will give us some more clues:
How reliable is swade ?
The saab marketing boys love the 9-X as much i do, what about the decision makers at GM/saab ?
Will the next Geneva show give birth to two Maurer creations ? A 4-door porsche saloon and a 2-door saab sportscar… ?
What if it isn’t a concept car, but a real production car under that white blanket ?
Do the Born-from-jets- & future 9-4X customers envy the Move-your-mind europeans because of a smaller saab ?
As i live in the trollhattan-time zone i wish you all a good night and sweet dreams/questions …
I understand the mix-up, however it does strike me as odd that Saab would go for this kind of build up.
Here is why, They will show the new 9-1 in little over 2 weeks, so the car must be finished by now. Also they have chosen the “new” 9-1 profile in the teaser at saab.com, unless that is a CGI as well. So why all of the sudden go back 7 years to the 9X for the next teaser shot. Looking at the teaser shot, the 9-1 has clearly different lines than the 9X. Why not use the “new” 9-1 and drape it for this poster.
Swade, I understand you trust your sources, as you should, I just can’t believe Saab would do such a thing. Either mess with you or mess with it’s potential customer base. You can’t go back 7 years in design, not in this market, no matter how beloved your design is. The 9X is a museum piece that should have been, let’s hope the 9-1 actually is.
Also, the comparison between the ads that you showed last week and this “new” one, state without a doubt in my mind that you have been had. This must have been the easiest to fabricate.
Nico, that would imply a deliberate deception and I don’t believe in any way that this source would do that – SW
The new 9-1 will look like the Astra (whether Opel or Saturn in size) and most likely will have 9-4X tail lights, just a guess.
I agree with Turbin. It appears that the 9x was used as a red herring to keep us in suspense. It worked.
(Call me hotpants and it will be one of your last actions.)
Wilfried, with regard to questions @ 12, I’d have hoped this explanatory post would have gone some way to show that I’m as open as I can be with stuff around here. To ask me to write more about sources is asking me to compromise the security of those sources.
Again, I believe the document to be quite real but using an old image.
To those who think I’ve been “had” – please consider what would be the motivation for someone doing so? Two seconds of noteriety on what in global terms is a pretty small website? I just don’t see it as being worth the risk.
I’ve been fed what I believe to be deliberately false information only once and that information never made its way onto the website. I’ve been fed mistaken information once (the Turbo X power claim) but whether that was deliberate or mistaken won’t be known unless I get to speak to the source again, which I don’t envisage I will.
In terms of my reliability, be assured that I’ll be doing everything I can to ensure it.
Hi Swade,
I did not mean a deception from your source directly, maybe he or she was used as well. Anyway, Saab wasn’t to happy about all the postings of the Saab 9-4X under embargo, which you only followed after a Dutch site broke that embargo.
Also on the Swiss Saab site: saab.ch Saab uses the phrase: “Die Differenz heisst Zukunft” for the intro in the Saab BioPower. It shows the current 5 models sold in Europe. Make of it what you will, so both the image and text have been used before, if genuine, a real red herring indeed. But I doubt it, sorry.
http://www.saab.ch/main/CH/de/model/95/biopower.shtml
Later, Nico
We still love ya’, Swade… Even in the conspiracy-theorist gotcha’
I can’t wait for Geneva!
It would be cheaper for Saab to use the 9X concept than to re-invent the wheel, but I still can’t see how you could make a 5 door version of the car. I’d definitely want a 3 door, but Saab really needs a 5 door also to go up against the likes of the A3 five door. Guess we’ll all know in a couple of weeks?
One thing that is very evident is that the “team” here and TS is well informed and it will be hard for anyone to pull one over on the group.
Team being Swade plus all of us.
Thanks to Swade and the rest of you for your insight, without both, this would not be nearly as interesting!
These two images ARE THE SAME CAR, the 9x concept of years ago. What you are all noticing to be different – the front overhang, etc. is actually a result of perspective, not of different designs. Because the top image is from a 3D modeling program that adds camera perspective, and perspective has a habbit of tricking the eye and making large overhangs appear smaller – a la Audi R8. The second image is a “true” or orthographic side view, notice how you cannot see the far two wheels behind the near ones. Without perspective, many cars will look very different than they would in real life.
This discrepancy is due to the modeling program using a bit too much perspective. Different cameras can capture the same image very different ways. Witness these two images of the Ferrari Enzo, and look at how much the front overhang differs. This is due to different lens properties.
http://www.ferraris-online.com/cars/FE-ENZO-134282/images/P007Web.jpg
http://www.khodrobazar.com/photo_gallery/albums/10001/normal_Ferrari-Enzo-Doors-Open-Side-Track.jpg
While I do not expect everyone to take my word on this, I can offer you my assurance that both of these images are indeed from the same 9x concept, not showing two variants of it. All of the other details are exactly the same. The trick at work here is something designers call ‘plan view’ or ‘plan shape.’ This refers to the amount of curve that is given to the front or rear bumpers. When a package (the technical engineering hardpoints of a vehicle) require a vehicle to have a rather large (and often ugly) front overhang, this is often disguised by giving the car a lot of plan view (or wrap). The Audi R8 is a great example of this. In true side view, the car looks like its going to scrape its chin off, but in real life, this is not the case. When designers do not give a car enough plan view shape, an akward proportion can result, witness my 9000.
http://www.saab.lt/klubas/gallery/918.jpg
To summarize, these are definately both images of the 9x, not the upcoming 9-1.
Hope I’ve cleared this up a bit.
9000,
I think we’ve established pretty well that these are the same car. No problem with that. However, I have to disagree that the difference here is merely perspective. For one, on the image that I used, there is no fuel filler hole like there is at the back of the second one. The button used to gain entry to the car is present on the door in the first image, but invisible on the second (at this resolution, at least). Window wipers are in one but not the other.
I think these are from different stages of the design process but am willing to be proven wrong. It won’t be the first time today
Appreciate the insight you’ve got there, though. Good stuff.
Saab can’t be so stupid they would basically release the same car 7 years later and try to pass it off as a new concept? ….could they?
Bueller….. Bueller…..?
How about this thought – Saab is trying to find out Swade’s inside contacts. So what do you do – you release some fake shots to a few Saab employees and see if they get posted on TS?
Joemama, you might be right! At least that´s a very good theory. But then on the otherhand I believe those Djup Strupes are smart enough to know when some info is too obviously from a specific source.
I sure hope that there will be something behind this, and 9-1 will have some design ideas from 9x. At least it get´s shown with 9x and Aero x and not with 9-4x for example, which is also a concept presented in Geneva.
swade,
I believe that you’re right – I believe that the blue-ish rendering, and i call it a rendering, is a snapshot from a surface modeling program taken soon before the final sendoff, and at this point, details such as the ones you pointed out were not put in yet.
Swade,
I hope you did not take my reliability-question to serious.
The amount of comments on these 9-1 entries shows our interest in the product, regardless of number of doors, a real 9X or cgi or a false cheater under the sheet, etc. .
Some thoughts on ‘Differenz’:
Concerning the ‘Differenz’ between the two 9-X’s : it can be both a matter of perspective & a matter of design phase.
If you are involved in the design process, in the formmaking of the object – I guess it is with cars the same as with other things – you constantly question the results you’ve got so far by looking at the object from every possible angle. The medium you’re using doesn’t matter , it can be done by real 3D-model (clay, cardbord,…), virtual 3D-model (cgi, cadcam, …) and 2D-sketches and drawings. And while constantly questioning, discussing and comparing a new result with the previous ones you make design-decissions.
So if you take a good look at the picts above you can see more differences than the front overhang, i.e. the B-pillar has at the connection with the front door a slightly different angle, the corners of this pillar in connnection with roof on the upper side and door on the under side are in the picture above straight corners and in the picture below they have very tiny roundings, in the one picture the whipers are sunken under the bonnet or simply not there, the front wheelarches in the picture above are more prononciated, … .
So i guess it can be both a different angle & perspective and a different time of design process the pictures are taken from.
You’ll have to know in designing things there is always a matter of (extreme) time pressure & various deteminating factors & continous layers like functionality, technicality, etc. – so not just the generating of mere images, what makes the process of designing something different than the process of making art.
Maybe it is just very clever stunt from saab using the 9X, because it diminishes the amount of journo- & hobby-photoshoppers to make scoops for sites like this one or magazines …
And surely the 9-1 will have some reference towards the 9-X. There is nothing wrong with that, even if it is 8 years old. A good piece of design is in its general form always timeless, only details tell more about a certain period or fashion of a time.
or…
Someone a GM had an idea of who inside is a Djup Strupe to Swade, and leaked the pic to that person to see if it ended up on the net. It’s a game that Apple is known to be good at…
I agree with 9000.
The difference between the two pics are perspective and small, late-in-the-modelling-process details different in the 3d model. No big deal.
The overhang is the same, just the curved corners tricking the eye in the perspective shot. Curved corners are supposed to make the car look smaller, as you can never see the full extension of the car. Volvo is good at this – look at the XC90, and you notice that you will never see a corner, just surfaces curving away.
)
(Sorry about the Volvo reference