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UPDATE: Some facts have been checked and corrected.

Well, at least I know what the problem is with the convertible. And it has a lot to do with this picture of my (former) jumper cables.

Read on for the explaination.

As you may recall, just before Christmas, I had the 9-5 in the shop to sort out a few things that took a bit longer than I expected, so I drove the 900 convertible to the airport on the front end of a 48-hour road trip. When I returned, the car simply went black on me about two miles from the airport on the way back home. Completely black. It stopped cold in full drive, and it couldn’t be jumped. I had it towed home by a character of a tow truck driver (they all have stories, believe me) and there it remained through the busy holiday period and through the incessant rain and cold. Today, with the high temp near 60 degrees F (about 17 degrees C), I figured that I’d get to the bottom of the problem.

As I’ve written before, I’d thought about how it failed and the other symptoms that the car exhibited. I’d compe to the conclusion that perhaps the diode was bad or that the alternator may have a winding fault. Beyond that, I suspected that there could be an open circuit somewhere or a fault with the ignition switch.

Today, I started by cleaning the grounds just to make sure that they were in good shape. On a C900, bad grounds are notorious. I then moved to the ignition switch, and with my multimeter it seemed to test out good. Then, I decided to try to jump start the car again just to see if I could find the fault with the battery charged up. To my surprise, my jumper cables were melted ether by heat or solvent (see picture above). Since they are well over ten years old, I figured that they could have been slowly deteriorating and the (very) stiff spring in the clamps has caused them to deform. I hooked them up, and, surprise, the car started on the first crank! Feeling smug that the bad ground was the problem all along, I decided to take it for a test drive around the neighborhood.

That was my mistake.

I got about a half mile (about 1 km) from my house and the car quit just as it had before. Abruptly, and completely black. Puzzled, I walked home to get the company-owned Chevrolet to jump it again. My wife saw me coming and offered to help. I said that she could drive the Impala back home and save me the half-mile walk to retrieve it once I jumped the 900, so off we went. As I took the jumper cables out of the trunk to connect them, she said, “Oh, I hope that your cables still work”. I looked at her and said, “They do, why do you ask?” To which she replied, “Oh, I had to jump the Chevrolet one morning when you were gone and I connected them to the opposite polarity by accident. They melted. I never got the Saab started, so it didn’t work. The Saab started the Impala after I put the cables right.”

She said, “Oh, I had to jump the Chevrolet one morning when you were gone and I connected them to the opposite polarity by accident. They [the jumper cables] melted. I never got the Saab started, so it didn’t work. The Saab started the Impala after I put the cables right.”

Stunned, I looked at her, slack-jawed. I had been wondering how the Saab got so messed up, and now I knew!! My wife killed my Saab!! And, to make matters worse, it gave its life for the freakin’ Impala!

When I say “killed”, I mean that she’s probably made my decision for me: the car was likely not worth saving before this chapter in its life, but now I’m sure that it’s not worth saving. The list of fixes was already very long, and now I’m pretty sure that the alternator and the diode are gone, and the power steering pump is making a racket that you wouldn’t believe.

RIP my friend. Your parts will live on, but I’ll have to start over with another. I’m kind of sad, but, I always like car shopping…