Winding Road magazine - online and completely free - have been jetting all around the world testing Saab’s new XWD system.

They drove two Saab XWD’s in France and then the Turbo X at the Ice Hotel in northern Sweden. These are the same press events that we’ve seen from other sources in the last month - but Winding Road reports on all three at once - around 6 pages worth - in their current issue.

There’s two common elements to all these reviews

1) The XWD system is brilliant and does its job superbly.

2) The six-speed manual needs to improve in the shifter department.

Hopefully Saab are taking notes from these sessions and feeding them through for the next generation of cars. Personally, I drove on six-speed car in Sweden last year and I found the shifter to be just fine, but then again I was shifting with my opposite hand and trying to concentrate whilst driving on the other side of the road.

One interesting point to come from these reviews was that as good as the XWD system is, what we’re seeing here in the 9-3 is a system adapted to a chassis that wasn’t designed to take it. It works, and works beautifully, but they note some sort of other-worldliness about it.

Taking nothing away from the current setup, what they (and I’m sure we too) are looking forward to is the next generation of cars - ones that will be designed to take this system from the ground up. In the first instance that’ll be the 9-4x and 9-5 next year.

Click here to bring up the Winding Road magazine. You can then click on the Turbo X reference on the front page to go straight to the article.