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It’s the end of the year and I thought it might be fun to close 2008 with some awards. Everyone else in the blogosphere does it, right?

2008 might just be the year that shaped the future of the automobile. Well, it’ll probably by 2009 really just because the main effects will take shape then, but 2008 should rightfully be noted as the fateful year because all of the conditions that led to those 2009 decisions happened this year. You still with me?

Such a tumultuous year meant that there was plenty happening on the wires in general, and of course, within Saab, too.

So here’s to 2008 and the year that was. Awards will be crafted from genuine Ice Hotel shavings and sent to award winners in a heatpak by some time in 2011, when the recession finishes and I can afford it.

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The Dilbert award for being grossly underappreciated goes to Saab and Haldex for producing the best darn all-wheel drive system in the world.

Right now, in a city near you, there’s someone in a manual gearbox Turbo X having the absolute time of their driving lives – and it’s all due to Saab’s Cross Wheel Drive system. There’s someone in a slushbox Turbo X having not-quite-such-a-good-time, but they can still kick it occasionally.

Cross Wheel Drive was a world first and it IS STILL the world’s best AWD system. We can only speculate on how much more the world’s automotive media would have crowed about it if it came on a BMW.

To all those engineers in Sweden – we noticed. And thanks.

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The “On The Roof” Award for persistence in the face of adversity goes to every Saab dealership still hanging on for grim life out there.

I’m sure there are a number of Saab dealers who are on the verge of using hallucinogens just so they can dream about better times than these. After hanging in there for years with product promises either overturned or unfulfilled, they’re now facing the prospect of customers staying away due to the uncertain nature of Saab’s future.

There are some questionable Saab dealers out there, as there are with every brand. But there’s some damn fine ones, too, and they deserve better than the raw deal they’ve received in the last few years.

To the Saab dealers out there: I hope 2009 can be the change-up year for you, too. Or the start of it, at least.

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The James Scott Award* for survival goes to the entire City of Detroit.

I didn’t get to see Detroit at its best back in January this year. it was freezing cold, grey, crumbling and old. It’s not a pretty place to look at. Not the bits that I saw, at least. For one of the few times in my life, I feared walking somewhere at night.

Yet from seeing photo collections like this, I realise that I only got to see a few blocks of the place and that there is some beauty there, somewhere.

More than that, there are people there. People trying to make a living and subject to some great decisions over the years, and some really bad ones as well. There’s a fabric to the place that we don’t know about. I know that much. Despite the fact I’d like Saab removed from there, I hope the place lives on and does OK.

* Australian student, James Scott, survived 43 days in an ice cave in the Himalayas back in 1992, living off melted snow and Mars Bars.

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The Hand of God award for providing hope for the future goes to the Saab 9-X Air, for being without doubt the outstanding Saab concept car of the year.

The 9-4x is a decent Saab SUV and the 9-X Biohybrid was a decent Saab compact car but a let down because we’ll likely never see it made.

The 9-X Air, however, is quite likely the root of a new Saab convertible that we’ll get to see in the future, all going well. And more than that, it’s an absolutely outstanding looking Saab.

The lines, the groundbreaking nature of the canopy top – it all adds up to a Saab in the geunine sense of the word. I really hope we get to see this car for real some day. Built right and priced right, it’d be a total re-emergence of Saab’s position in the convertible market.

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The William Shakespeare “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Et tu, Brute?” awards for making a big deal out of something that later turned out to be hot air whilst thinking in your head that that brand has to go – is awarded to Bob Lutz for his performance in Geneva in March 2008.

In Geneva, Bob proudly paraded the Saab 9-X BioHybrid Concept vehicle and gladhanded journalists saying that if Saab were to build this vehicle it’d be called the 9-1 and generally heaping praises on all persons present. The most significant word he mentioned in that whole time was “if” because the Saab small car has now been canned in favour of a smaller 9-3. Bob knew it then but didn’t say it, just like he knew that if something had to go from the GM stable, it was going to be the company that lent GM their expertise in turbocharging, safety and alternative fuel technology.

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The Alfred E. Neuman “What? Me Worry?” Award goes to the United States Senate

In two separate sessions, the US congress grilled the Detroit CEOs until they were red raw and begging to be slapped down just one more time so they could prove how really really humble they were.

Despite promises just a few months ago about bi-partisan approaches in times of national need, the US Senate got bogged down on minutae and figured this was their best chance at busting a union they didn’t like in one violent swoop. When the UAW didn’t blink, they figured they better not either, lest they look wussy in the eyes of their constituents.

The future of somewhere between 1-in-10 an 1-in-14 American jobs (it depends on who you read) has now fallen into the hands of a very reluctant lame duck President, who’d much rather be consulting with party planners than trying to get his head around the truck industry.

What? They make cars too?

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The James Brown Talkin Loud and Sayin Nothin Award goes to Robert Farago of The Truth About Cars.

Farago has been bellowing about GM’s demise for four full years and the Coliseum that is TTAC is almost at a frenzied level right now as GM teeter on the brink due to circumstances that no-one saw coming, including Farago and his best and brightest. It seems like every second day now there’s an imminent warning that bankruptcy’s only days away.

How frenzied has it got? Farago recently saw fit to print a story by a joe-blogger in Venezuela suggesting that Hugo Chavez should consider buying Saab – in fact he called it his “wild ass rumour of the day”.

Never before has so much talent been wasted on such a narrow minded body of work. One wonders what TTAC will become if GM do end up in Chapter 11. There’ll be nothing more to shout about.

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The TS Movable-Type-to-Wordpress If-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it Award for taking something that’s quite decent and making a complete mess of it goes to SaabUSA for the complete murder of the Build Your Own section of their website.

For the 2009 model year, the BYO section of SaabUSA’s website has moved from a reasonably Saab feel that gives you some idea of what your car will actually look like, to a third world General Motors shadow of it’s former self where every color you order initially showed up as Laser Red.

I’m pleased to say there’s now another color there, but it still stays the same as you can see from the Polar White 2.0T XWD sedan I just built. Click to enlarge.

Just remember, folks, someone got paid to do that.

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That pretty much wraps up the inaugural 2008 TS awards. I’d like to keep thinking of more awards, but if I did I’d never get this posted.

And the Answer-to-the-question-nobody-was-asking Award wouldn’t have made good reading.

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