No seriously, now you’ve got me wondering too.

Since the next 9-3 is clearly a ways down the road, it needs a new interior more than ever. Coupled with XWD it could really spring back to life alongside a new 9-5 and 9-4x. It would be a first in the history of Saab to have more than one car in the showroom that isn’t a dinosaur by today’s car life cycles.

«Three Generations of Saab History»

Peter Johansson is one of the chassis engineers responsible for the development of the new Saab XWD system. But his father, Sigge, is a former member of the competition department at Saab, who in the 1980s came up with a design for a limited-slip differential to use in rally cars. He took out a patent and eventually sold the rights to Haldex in 1987. Now, two decades later, that original design forms the basis of the electronically-controlled eLSD that his son worked with to develop Saab XWD.

In fact, the family’s connection with Saab goes back even further, right to the beginning of the car company. Peter’s maternal grandfather, Tage Flodén, is now a robust 88-year-old but in 1945 he started working for Saab Aircraft as a toolmaker and transferred to the newly-created car division in 1949 to make tooling for the first Saab 92 production car.

Over three generations, the Johansson family spans the history of Saab, from tooling up for its first production car to the launch of its latest product technology. “It’s a bit like a family business for us,” says Peter, 45, whose own seven-year-old son, Simon, is already showing a healthy interest in cars.

Sigge, now 74, was an accomplished race driver and rally competitor in the 60s and 70s, even fitting a turbocharger to a Saab 96 V4 as early as 1973. But it was his determination to improve traction and handling that prompted him to pursue his own design for a limited-slip differential.

“Saab suggested that my father should take his design to Haldex for development,” says Peter, who is also a keen racing driver who once beat a very young Ayrton Senna in a karting race in Sweden. “At that time, Haldex was not involved in the car industry but they could see the potential of this differential and decided to pursue its development.

“Dad has been for a ride in one of our test cars and was pretty impressed by what we have done with the XWD system. Obviously, we have come a long way from his time by adding four-wheel-drive and all the control electronics that were not around in his day.

“Both my father and grandfather can look back to when Saab was a much smaller company and I don’t think either of them ever imagined it would grow into the big international brand it is now. It is a story that the three of us feel part of, something that is very close our hearts.”

http://www.saab.com/main/GLOBAL/en/saab-i/2008/05/3_generations.shtml