Recently, here in Australia, our national broadcaster has been airing a show from England called Scrapheap Challenge. And I’m addicted to it.

For those who haven’t seen it before, what you’ve got is two rather corny English hosts, an equally corny but endearing script, you’ve got two teams of three people each, a scrapheap (of course) and a challenge (of course) to build something out of scrap in 10 hours. The “something” might be a powerboat, a spy-car, a submersible car, a Mini-flinger, a giant rapid-fire arrow shooter, a motorised chariot…. the list of challenges has been long and a great deal of fun to watch.

To complete each challenge, the team is given an ‘expert’ to guide them on their build. I’m consistently surprised at how they manage to fabricate and motorise their projects, and actually get them to work (most of the time).

The one thing that seems to come through from the show is that more often than not, the simple but effective design wins. If I were to counsel a team going on to the heap, I’d drum it in to their heads so that they never forgot – keep it simple, stupid!

The lesson I’d hope Saab could apply from this rather long introduction? Make sure you know what works and keep on making it better, and better, and better.

This all stems from the story doing the rounds today that BMW is considering adding a hatchback variant to it’s next generation of the 5-series. Auto Express claim that spy photos show an enlarged back window that could well point to a Skoda-style twindoor hatch opening on the next 5-er.

In all honesty, this seems to be a little bit of speculative opportunism on Auto Express’ part, a past-time they’re not unfamiliar with. But suppose it did happen to be true….

Around six years ago, the last of the turbocharged Saab hatchbacks made way for a Sports Sedan. Whilst it looked OK at the time and had a bunch of body-variant siblings on the drawing board that might have satisfied the traditionalists, the Saab 9-3 SS came with serious baggage in terms of costs and inflexibility. That baggage led to a freeze of sorts on Saab development whilst the place was restructured. The hatch was dead and despite the place held in people’s hearts, it was unlikely to be resurrected any time soon.

Two years ago BMW got a lot of people excited, and a lot of Saab fans a little worried, when they announced their 3-litre twin turbocharged engine. That engine has gone on to win a Best Engine award two years in a row and when you drive it, you can see why. It is a very good powerplant.

Now, if AutoExpress are right, it seems that BMW are exploring the world of the hatchback. A world that we who are immersed in it know to be a place full of good common sense, sporty profiles and heaps of luggage room. A world that Saab claimed as their own for many years before abandoning it in a fruitless chase for more market share, primarily in the US market.

So perhaps a reminder is in order. One that I’m pretty sure Saab designers are mindful of themselves, though their pencil-wielding, beancounting colleagues may not quite understand.

Saab’s formula should be fairly simple – intelligent vehicles that provide comfort, safety, performance and utility. For many years, Saab achieved that with the use of wagons and hatchbacks, which were an economical and very Swedish solution for the problem of being able to get a lot of gear into your vehicle.

Saab have already given up a lot of the high ground on turbocharging. They don’t have a hatch in the range at the moment but there’s still a lot of credits in the bank thanks to the 900 and 9000. It’s time to cash in.

Please bring back the hatch, at least as an option on all these future models that are coming out. Make Saabs that are Saabs. It’s fairly simple.

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If you’re reading from Australia, Scrapheap Challenge is shown on ABC2 at 6.30pm, six nights a week, though I fear they’re rapidly running out of episodes to show.

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And thanks to the many people who emailed me about the BMW hatch story.

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This is a Saab blog, so I’ve put that headline in Saab terms. But transpose any company you like in there and ask the same question – who should be having input into the products that a company sells?

Go and read nearly any book on Saab’s birth and development and the stories that you’ll encounter are about Sixten Sason, Bjorn Envall, Rolf Mellde, Gunnar Ljungstrom and Sten Wennlo. With the possible exception of Mr Wennlo (I don’t know much about him) all the others are engineers or designers. These were the guys who devised Saab’s early products.

We all hold on quite proudly to the fact that Saab started in the car business with a clean sheet of paper and designed a car the way they thought it should be made. It was the 1940′s and relatively little was known about car esign. They didn’t have too much conventional thinking to weigh them down so they set about making a car for the Swedish people. Those early cars had their faults and limitations, but they also had the essence that would carry Saab right into the 1990s – an incredible feat.

Other notable car companies have done the same thing: they’ve adopted a particular philosophy and developed it, expanded it, honed it to perfection. Think of Porsche, Ferrari, BMW. Even Toyota and Subaru have done the same thing within their own corporate philosophies. These are the things that happen when you allow engineers and designers to drive product development. You get great products that the sales and marketing people can then go out and sell.

Where is all this leading, I hear you ask?

GM has recently started to show real signs of the design-led recovery that Bob Lutz keeps talking about. It’s really encouraging.

But I’m still puzzled by the recent corporate realignment that sees one guy taking charge of three GM Premium brands in North America and how his position is going to influence the development of those three brands. I asked questions about this last week and I still haven’t received an answer from Saab USA yet.

Consider this article from Advertising Age today:

Importantly, the new VPs will have a seat at GM’s product-development councils, which Peter Ternes, a GM spokesman, said was “the biggest change.” Under the current system, a centralized global panel headed by product czar Bob Lutz decides which models will be made. Three of the four new channel chiefs “will have a voice” on new products, the spokesman said…..

….This is a change that will make marketers at many other companies very jealous. Brand champions are typically charged with being the ears of their companies, using either traditional market research or, more recently, social-media tools to garner insights about what consumers want. But it’s still relatively rare that they get to impart those insights early enough in the process to influence the product.

I’m not sure which one makes me more nervous – a group of Lutzian yes-men gathering in a dark room deciding which crumbs might fall from the table in Saab’s direction. Or a group of Lutzian yes-men including a brand chief who’s got to divide his thoughts between three premium brands for the US, one of which is distinctly un-American and a smaller chance for him to hit the home-run that’ll get him to that next rung on the corporate ladder.

Forgive my scepticism, but Saab already had a chief in the US and I just don’t see how adding another later of management is going to help things.

And I really don’t see how giving this new guy influence and input in product decisions is going to help things, either. Any student of 1980s and 1990s major-brand vehicles would know that allowing the marketing people too much influence results in cars that drive like pancakes, look out of date before they’re developed and are underengineered thanks to costs being reallocated to the parties with the shiniest teeth.

I want Saabs to be Saabs. I want all the great design elements that made Saabs of the past so distinctive. I don’t want to re-live the past, but I want each and every Saab to fresh, new and yet familiar.

Saab have two crucial things going for them – potential and soul. The marketers can help to realise the former, but its the engineers and designers who make the latter. I hope the cat in the hat understands this. All three of his brands will be better off for it if he does.

One of the national Saab General Managers recently referred to me as possibly being one of those kooks on the internet (words to that effect). That’s fair enough. We’ve never met and he’s got a job to do. Better to not worry about what’s in the news when you’ve got a brand to resurrect.

This story ain’t about Saab Canada. I’ve softened on them a little in the last few weeks. This very quick rant is about our good friends at Cadillac in Europe, who I’m sure also dismiss me as some sort of kook.

I wrote perhaps the best piece I’ll ever write with regard to Cadillac in Europe back in September last year. It was called Saab vs Cadillac and I’m not going to reinvent the wheel by trying to rephrase it here.

My consistent line has been that the relentless development of Cadillacs for Europe has been a colossal waste of time and money. GM people consider that GM can’t be successful if Cadillac isn’t successful. They also consider that Cadillac is the only card in GM’s deck that can be played in the premium sector. I’ve had GM staff say those things to me.

And I think it’s crap.

Why am I re-hashing all this? Because Autocar have an interesting article about the demise of the Cadillac BLS:

Cadillac is to ditch its unsuccessful Saab-based BLS and build a striking new rear-drive saloon in its latest bid to rival BMW’s 3-series and Audi’s A4.

Called Project Alpha and due in Europe in 2011, the new car will be a key part of General Motors’ latest efforts to make Cadillac a global player. But it will use a rear-wheel drive platform that is currently under development in the US…..Project Alpha is part of GM’s plan to improve Cadillac’s image outside of the US. In Europe, the perception of Cadillacs as oversized V8 American barges is still putting off buyers.

I wonder if there’s a soul out there in GME land who’d be brave enough to tally up the total amount wasted on the development and promotion of the Cadillac brand in general, and the BLS in particular?

And you want to know the irony? If GM were brave enough to answer questions about this issue honestly, according to how they really feel, they’d tell you that Saab are lucky that Cadillac came along. That if it weren’t for the BLS, the 2008 Saab 9-3 wouldn’t be as good as it is.

They wouldn’t tell you that the 9-3 could be even better than it is if the money lost on Cadillac were channeled into the Saab line. Only that Saab have been lucky to get some scraps from Cadillac’s table.

GM – maybe it’s the meds talking, but sometimes you really give me the irrits.

If you’ve got to fix your big brands first, how long are Saab fans expected to wait around before you get to a brand that impacts your sales and your margins the least, despite the expertise you take from it and the potential it has for you?