Trollhattan Saab has changed!
The site you're viewing now is the original Trollhattan Saab weblog, though it's now an archive only and no new material is posted here. As of February 2009, all new material is posted at our new site - Saabs United.
Please join us at Saabs United and get your daily Saab fix from Saab sources all around the world.

I’ve just got off the phone with Eric Geers, the Information Minister at Saab in Sweden (not his real title) and one of the first things I asked him about was the recent discovery of a design patent application with pictures of the Saab 9-6x.

The end reply: “That car is completely off the table”

it took a few moments to get there, mind you. This car is so far off the table that I had to go back and re-cover last weekend’s report on the patent discovery in order to introduce the subject.

Eric surmised, like many of you in comments, that it was something else that brought about this design patent. It certainly wasn’t any plan for production and the patent didn’t originate out of a Swedish office as far as he knew.

“It could be something to do with some legal issues or something, but I don’t know. That car has nothing to do with out portfolio planning. It was initially destined to be the 9-6….”

With the discovery of the patent application last weekend, a few websites began to speculate that the model might still be a possibility. The TurboNines forum speculated after a little historical research that this might have been the case. This story was picked up by Jalopnik, and shortly thereafter by Motor Authority and a few others.

I think we can now sleep safely knowing that the next rounds of Saabs we’ll see will be designed as Saabs from the ground up.

I covered a few other issues with Eric Geers during this call, and I’ll get around to transcribing those in the near future.

For now, take a final look at what would have been the 9-6x and kiss it goodbye.

–