Who should be deciding Saab’s future products?
This is a Saab blog, so I’ve put that headline in Saab terms. But transpose any company you like in there and ask the same question - who should be having input into the products that a company sells?
Go and read nearly any book on Saab’s birth and development and the stories that you’ll encounter are about Sixten Sason, Bjorn Envall, Rolf Mellde, Gunnar Ljungstrom and Sten Wennlo. With the possible exception of Mr Wennlo (I don’t know much about him) all the others are engineers or designers. These were the guys who devised Saab’s early products.
We all hold on quite proudly to the fact that Saab started in the car business with a clean sheet of paper and designed a car the way they thought it should be made. It was the 1940’s and relatively little was known about car esign. They didn’t have too much conventional thinking to weigh them down so they set about making a car for the Swedish people. Those early cars had their faults and limitations, but they also had the essence that would carry Saab right into the 1990s - an incredible feat.
Other notable car companies have done the same thing: they’ve adopted a particular philosophy and developed it, expanded it, honed it to perfection. Think of Porsche, Ferrari, BMW. Even Toyota and Subaru have done the same thing within their own corporate philosophies. These are the things that happen when you allow engineers and designers to drive product development. You get great products that the sales and marketing people can then go out and sell.
Where is all this leading, I hear you ask?
GM has recently started to show real signs of the design-led recovery that Bob Lutz keeps talking about. It’s really encouraging.
But I’m still puzzled by the recent corporate realignment that sees one guy taking charge of three GM Premium brands in North America and how his position is going to influence the development of those three brands. I asked questions about this last week and I still haven’t received an answer from Saab USA yet.
Consider this article from Advertising Age today:
Importantly, the new VPs will have a seat at GM’s product-development councils, which Peter Ternes, a GM spokesman, said was “the biggest change.” Under the current system, a centralized global panel headed by product czar Bob Lutz decides which models will be made. Three of the four new channel chiefs “will have a voice” on new products, the spokesman said…..
….This is a change that will make marketers at many other companies very jealous. Brand champions are typically charged with being the ears of their companies, using either traditional market research or, more recently, social-media tools to garner insights about what consumers want. But it’s still relatively rare that they get to impart those insights early enough in the process to influence the product.
I’m not sure which one makes me more nervous - a group of Lutzian yes-men gathering in a dark room deciding which crumbs might fall from the table in Saab’s direction. Or a group of Lutzian yes-men including a brand chief who’s got to divide his thoughts between three premium brands for the US, one of which is distinctly un-American and a smaller chance for him to hit the home-run that’ll get him to that next rung on the corporate ladder.
Forgive my scepticism, but Saab already had a chief in the US and I just don’t see how adding another later of management is going to help things.
And I really don’t see how giving this new guy influence and input in product decisions is going to help things, either. Any student of 1980s and 1990s major-brand vehicles would know that allowing the marketing people too much influence results in cars that drive like pancakes, look out of date before they’re developed and are underengineered thanks to costs being reallocated to the parties with the shiniest teeth.
I want Saabs to be Saabs. I want all the great design elements that made Saabs of the past so distinctive. I don’t want to re-live the past, but I want each and every Saab to fresh, new and yet familiar.
Saab have two crucial things going for them - potential and soul. The marketers can help to realise the former, but its the engineers and designers who make the latter. I hope the cat in the hat understands this. All three of his brands will be better off for it if he does.
More from this category
- Let Saabs be Saabs
- Interiors - if they know this, then why???
- Saab Design: a debate worth having - by Lance Cole
- Do Saab and General Motors (finally) have a convergent future?
More from this author
- IntSaab 2009 schedule posted
- Tuesday Snippets
- Does Automotive News still have an editor?
- TS moves to Russia?
Subscribe to this author
Recent Comments
- Markac on A single EnG snippet that just won’t wait
- 1985 Gripen on Tuesday Snippets
- kdsaab on Tuesday Snippets
- Rogan on A single EnG snippet that just won’t wait
- Burbs on Monday Snippets
- Troll96 on Tuesday Snippets
- MarkS on A single EnG snippet that just won’t wait
- Alex on A single EnG snippet that just won’t wait
- Markac on A single EnG snippet that just won’t wait
- turbin on Tuesday Snippets
Any movements in GM’s management is a cause for concern. They have given reason for concern in years past. I guess my issue is with this “premium brand” talk. I dont know what they mean to do. Car making is a business, and that said you need to know where you want to be in that business. GM wants to dominate all before it. Saab as an organization has never even considered such a concept.
Is GM management going to really try and make saab a bmw/lexus/mercedes competitor? if so why? Does cadillac in the US not fit this bill? Does Saab in europe not fit that bill? When is it what you get for your money, instead of what u get “better” then the other guys money? If GM were to do anything right, it would to give saab the freedom and funds it deserves. Saab has a following and still perceived as “different”. I think with some fair R&D and focus they can let this company go back to what they know. Design cars, and convert people into followers. GM’s benefit would be a technology bin to breathe new life into their other brands, and one car brand to take chances, while the others fight over car and driver reviews.
I am so glad that you decided to stay independend… Tanks!
Edwin
Consider this list: Malibu, Acadia (and clones), ‘08 CTS, Aura, Invicta, Solstice. Without doubt, these are the best designed and engineered cars to come out of GM in decades, maybe ever. They all bear the unmistakable signature of Bob Lutz. In GM’s recent history, there is BL and AL, before Lutz and after Lutz. What worries me is this notion of “design by committee.” Rarely does anything good ever come from it. I would trust Lutz with Saab before I’d trust a committee of tin pushers.
Up until 1992 Mercedes-Benz used internally, when designing a new car, the slogan: the best or nothing. Then they built the W140 (the huge S-Class) and got loads of criticism. The director of the company concluded that with this car they had given answers to questions nobody had been asking. So they decided to listen to the customers (that’s what marketing guys do). Well, they now know that that is not the way. At Ford the same thing happened (Fiesta, Escort). They also know now that you should follow your own instinct. When you ask the customer, he gives you an answer that is 10 years after you need it.
If mr. Mc Nabb should be one of the guys deciding what saab should build than we have a problem. The USA are only a quarter of Saab’s total market. And I believe mr. Forster and Jan-Ake Jonsson really do want to have their say in it.
They should just let the Saab engineers design the car and then let the marketers get it afterwards. Marketers having input during the design phase is what caused the “drives the same, looks the same” GM of the 80s. It’s what caused the Cimarron. It’s what caused Pontiac to become a national joke (thank God for you Aussies and your hoonmobiles, I’m eternally grateful for the G8).
If the marketing people are really going to get a say in design, then GM is really going to be taking about 100 steps backwards. Suddenly, it’s 1983.
What is the central issue for Saab? Is it long range planning or short-term survival? Is it do-your-own-thing or fit into the GM system? Is the goal to build performance cars for enthusiasts or build practical but spirited cars for a broader market? Folks here at TS seem to gravitate between these poles.
Many brilliant car makers of the 1920’s and 1930’s went bust because they could not sustain their business model. Decades later, DeLorean broke free of Detroit, started with a clean sheet of paper…and also went belly up.
GM has already learned from its experience with Saturn that it cannot afford to nurture a “different kind of car” brand with separate design and manufacturing capabilities. Saab is not viable as a stand-alone company, so it has to accept exposure to non-Saab currents within GM.
One may and should observe whether certain decisions are actually beneficial to GM, but it seems utopian to act as if there is a Saab interest that stands apart from GM’s.
I may be way off, but would having one guy looking over Saab and Cadillac be a good thing? They can more directly insure that there is little overlap and perhaps get a bit of the attention that has been showered on Cadillac onto Saab now that the 3rd premium brand is, like, well, useless now.
Troll96 has it right. As much as “we” all love SAABs, we are trying to be the “customers” that drove some of the other cars into oblivion by driving the design. It was also pointed out earlier that when SAAB first started out it was driven by engineers. That is all well and good and we have all had fun with them through the years, but we have to remember they almost went Belly up, and GM had to buy them.
Ben - That’s a good point, but the problem is, he’s more likely to go the other direction and share as many parts as possible to keep costs down. Now, Cadillac gets a lot of good parts, so part of that might be a good thing, but at some point, you’re just driving a FWD Caddy with Saab bodywork. I love Cadillacs, but I don’t want Saab to turn into them. Having a strict marketing/beancounting guy head up Saab and Cadillac would be a disaster for this reason.
This is why I think Saab and GM are such a poor match for each other, and why after almost 20 years GM still doesn’t seem to know what to do with the brand.
Saab was your classic European car company, the engineers designed the cars and then the styling department did their best to wrap them in an eye-catching body. It was obvious though that the biggest focus of the R&D process was on the chassis, the interior, and what was under the hood. That’s what left us with the Saabs of yore, cutting-edge engines, class leading safety and handling, ergonomic interiors, and all. Saab isn’t the only company that’s like this, Volvo, VW/Audi, BMW, Mercedes, and the Japanese companies have made their existence through this “engineering comes first” design approach, and they’ve been damned successful at it to boot.
GM on the other hand is a classic American company with a classic American design philosophy when it comes to new models. Ever since the postwar 50’s, American cars have largely been sold on looks alone. The idea was to attract the new-car buyer with flashy bodywork that made last year’s model look like a thing of the past. Rather than spend the huge sums of money that the Europeans did engineering cars with 100k and 200k lifespans in mind, American manufacturers took the cheaper approach and slapped new bodywork on the same old 50k lifespan mechanicals. This is why you see so many more old Japanese and European cars than American ones.
Now for a while the American car companies got along fine selling the same old low-tech mechanical bits with different body panels on them. That working-man’s Chevy was only a front end and an interior away from being a plush Cadillac. The European cars were never real competition because they were simply too expensive for most American car buyers. The problems started when the Japanese started selling cars that were as good if not better-engineered than the Europeans but were price-competitive with the Americans. You could argue that the US car industry hasn’t and won’t ever recover from this.
Now why does this concern Saab? Because Saab is a European car company, and the buyers of European cars will compare Saabs with the other superbly-engineered offerings from Audi, BMW, Mercedes, and they will expect Saab to offer the same excellent level of engineering that the other brands offer.
The problem is that GM still hasn’t recovered from this “style over substance” design philosophy, and the new CTS and Malibu are great examples. Sure, they are the best-looking GM products in years, and their interiors are fantastic, but the CTS still can’t drive and handle like the Germans and there are serious questions about whether the new Malibu will have the bulletproof reliability of it’s Japanese and Korean competition.
GM seems to be extending this design philosophy to Saab as well. Superficially the 9-3SS looks like a Saab, but it lacks the cutting-edge engine choices, and the class-leading acceleration, handling, and chassis feel that enjoyed so much about the Saabs of the 70’s and the 80’s.
Now I have no doubt that Lutz’s “design-led recovery” will do good things for GM, but I just don’t see it working with Saab. Saab doesn’t just need flashy designs in order to sell cars, Saab needs cars that are ENGINEERED to compete with the excellent offerings from the Germans, Japanese, and now the Koreans as well. While parts-bin interiors and engines are fine for Cadillac, those kinds of cost-saving measures are just incompatible with a successful Saab.
Better to give Saab it’s own set of engines and interior fittings that can be shared between Saab’s own models than to expect Saab to build BMW-killers from the Opel parts bin and a flashy body.
But it’s alot cheaper to tool up a new set of body panels for Epsilon, and that’s why I’m doubtful that we’ll ever see any good come from the GM-Saab relationship.
Alex - Have you ever driven a CTS? Or a CTS-V, for that matter? And of course there are serious questions about the Bu’s reliability compared to the Camcord - it’s a new car from an American company. If people didn’t question its reliability, hell would freeze over.
Look, the bottom line is, if GM tried to engineer completely unique Saabs, they’d be astronomically expensive, and they’d be lucky to get sales into triple digits. If Saab was owned by any other company, the same thing would happen. No one who has the money to make Saabs completely unique will ever own them. I’m not trying to be a jerk, but you keep making the same argument every time anything GM-related comes up, and your desires for the brand are just flat unrealistic.
What is slightly more realistic is the possibility that GM might see the light and allow Saab to tweak the platforms like they did with the GMT360 for the 9-7x. Then you have Saab driving characteristics and Saab engineering to go along with the Saab design and GM price.
I just read Autoblog’s report on this whole “brand czar” thing, and apparently, this new level or bureaucracy isn’t actually adding a new level, because the 4 brand bosses will be replacing 5 regional general managers.
The real issue is still that these new bosses have a seat on the design board, which of course isn’t good, but this is still something else to consider.
Saab didn’t do any “tweaking” on the 9-7x, it was all PR spin to help get the dealerships to overlook the fact that they were being given a rebadged trailblazer while Ford gave Volvo the class-leading XC90.
And the CTS and it’s excellent road dynamics must be exactly why it finishes at the back of the pack in every comparison test against BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Infiniti, and Lexus. The -V may be fast in a straight line, but it still has a long way to go before it’s anywhere close to the M, S, and AMG cars in any way other than raw horsepower.
And lastly, don’t make excuses for GM about how it wouldn’t be economical to make Saabs the cars that they deserve to be. Sure, Saab’s sales numbers may be no good right now, but I think that has alot more to do with the lackluster product that GM has thrust down their throats than it does with Saab’s actual viability as a brand. It’s a “build it and they will come” relationship, Saab has potential to break 500k sales a year, but that won’t happen as long as GM only gives Saab the scraps from Opel’s platform, parts, and engine bins.
The fact that GM is still in pretty rough financial shape spells bad things for Saab in the short term, as it’s unlikely that GM has the spare cash to make the kinds of serious investment in real products that Saab needs to reverse it’s slump.
That, combined with the “style over substance” attitude that ALL American car manufacturers have when it comes to new model development is why I think Saab would be better off in the hands of another company.