Tuesday Snippets
A fun photo from Flickr.
Note the brushed aluminium trim. Rather unusual for a 900.
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AutoWeek has a Geneva preview article chock full of release notes for various carmakers.
Add Alfa to the list of potential Saab 9-1 competitors in years to come as they release the new Alfa Junior. Can’t wait to see it.
There’s some disturbing content there about the 9-1, though:
Sources say that if GM approves production, the 9-1 would be developed on the company’s new global front-drive compact-vehicle architecture and go on sale after 2010, possibly as late as 2012. GM sources say some plans for that vehicle architecture are uncertain because of regulatory issues.
AutoWeek is pretty well connected, being the non-subscription arm of Automotive News. I’d love to know what those regulatory issues are, and what they might mean in terms of the concept car we see next week and the production car that will finally be released a few years down the road.
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Consumer Reports has a good article on it’s site about how vehicle crash testing is performed. CR don’t do their own testing, but they do partner up with the IIHS and host videos of the IIHS tests on their site.
Informative reading.
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It’s been stormy in Sweden in recent times. This photo from a newspaper there, sent in by ctm.
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Sad image. Like seeing a good steak go to waste. Only worse.
*Sniff sniff*
(Salutes)
If Saab have to wait until 2012 to produce a 9-1, then what’s shown at Geneva will be 4 years out of date and it’ll lose many potential customers who aren’t prepared to wait. Autoweek’s comments are quite vague and obscure since any ‘regulatory issues’ will also apply to the next Astra.
Many of us Saab enthusiasts have never really liked the 9-3SS, don’t want a newer, larger 9-5 and aren’t in the market for an SUV. Hope of a 9-1 is the only thing keeping us from going elsewhere. Saab had better get it’s act together with the 9-1 launch. Let’s have no more dissapointments and the ‘too little, too late’ approach we’ve seen most of this decade.
2012? God help us.
What’s the point of showing anything if the actual car won’t be available for four years?
Here’s an interesting contrast. Toyota will show their next Prius at the 2009 Detroit Auto Show, and start selling it in the Spring of the same year.
That’s four months, not four years!
Doesn’t GM realize that showing a prototype kills the sales of the old model? If the production car won’t be available in the foreseeable future, customers will just go to the competition.
just make it 2015 and Doc Brown can drive it back to the future before Saab’s existance slowly erases….