These photos are around two months old now, but as I flicked through my email and rediscovered them tonight, I was totally awestruck once again by how amazing a car the Saab Aero X really is. There’s truly nothing else like it.
Photo by Ivan. More here
The Aero-X was recently on display in Hungary, and Z and Ivan both hooked me up with some photos of the exhibition. Their enthusiasm upon seeing this car was a joy to behold. I saw it around six months after it was first shown in Geneva back in 2006, and I felt exactly the same way.
You can’t look upon the Aero X for the first time without it bringing a smile to your face and an increase to your heart rate. If you don’t experience a connection to this car when you see it in the flesh, chances are you’re a robot of some sort.
This is possibly the most emotive vehicle ever to wear a Saab badge. Period. And next year, we’ll see the first car we can buy that’s been designed from the ground up with this as the reference point.
Photo by Z
When you read interviews with Saab executives and they talk about GM’s real involvement with, and commitment to Saab starting in 2005, this is the car they’re talking about. The Saab Aero X made its world debut at the Geneva motor show in late February 2006. I took them 12 months from early 2005 to design and build the car from scratch.
It feels kind of nice to know that this car was conceived right around the time this blog started – in February 2005. Kind of like kindred spirits, if I may be so bold. If I only knew what was coming down the pipeline…..
Photo by Z
The Aero-X won the Best-in-Show award at the Geneva motor show in 2006 and it’s not hard to see why. It’s absolutely stunning in photos and even better in person. It’s got more presence than Brangelina in a mud hut and looks faster than Lewis Hamilton on speed. And all of that’s before you hit the controls and raise the roof, at which time this car confirms itself as truly being from another world.
Photo by Z
It’s a shame that they won’t build it and it’s taken far too long to build something brand new baased on its design language, but the 9-5 that we’ll see next year will probably be as close as we get to an Aero X that we can buy.
It’ll be an all-new and improved drive and a vehicle design that unlike the 9-3 – which was supposedly the first vehicle to take on the Aero X design language – the next Saab 9-5 won’t have any legacy design from a previous generation to hold it back.
GM’s ‘commitment’ to Saab started almost five years ago. That’s a heck of a long time to take developing a new model and now that it’s almost upon us, we have to hope and pray that the gaps will be smaller in the future. But I can’t help but look at these images and think to myself that the 9-5 we’ll see next year is going to be a ballpark-busting home run of a motor car.
With a parent like this, how could it be anything else?
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