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The New Saab 9-5
The 9-5 is now everything I ever wanted it to be. It shed it's sensible skin and turned to the dark side ...
My thoughts on the GM Saabs are well-known. When they first pushed the new shape 900 out of the gates of Trollhättan, I was against for all the wrong reasons. It was a car that was painfully dull to look at and even duller to drive.
When the car mutated in the 9-3, the car became ridiculously sensible but just as generally dull and uninspiring.
The 9-5 was just as sensible when it appeared but at least it looked the part, in a conservative accountant sort of way. But when Saab face-lifted it a couple of years ago, put in that bloody awful IKEA matt pine dash panel and those headlamps that made the car look cross-eyed, I lost all hope that they would ever produce an interesting looking car again.
How wrong I was. Saab have just built the car I’ve wanted them to build for the last 15 years. The new 9-5 is gorgeous, not in the least bit sensible and obviously has never heard of IKEA.
I won’t bore you with why I was standing on a Saab main dealer forecourt but as I looked closer and then closer still at this black beast of a car, my jaw got closer and closer to the floor.
I couldn’t believe that such a transformation could be done. Everything about this car reminds me of when I was 7. I stood there in absolute awe marvelling at the new dash, the new seats, the new back end and that new front which makes this car look evil …
The kind of evil that pulls the wings off flies and incinerates spiders with a magnifying glass just for fun. The kind of evil that undoubtedly looks to buy nuclear weapons or sharks with freaking laser beams on their heads. So as to defend some fiendish plan or another. If a Doctor was to buy one of these 9-5’s he would be DR EVIL!! Ha ha.
If owned one of these Saabs I would be out at 6 am every Saturday morning licking it clean. I would use it every day to terrify pensioners in their Civics and Nissan Sunnys.
I don’t care that it will probably suffer from the same mechanical nonsense that all the other 9-5’s suffer from. I don’t care that it will not be able to get its 260 bhp down to the road. I don‘t care that it will undoubtedly be an absolute pig to work on. The 9-5 is now everything I ever wanted it to be. It has shed its sensible skin and turned to the dark side. This car is now DARTH VADER on four wheels and I WANT ONE!
So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to sell the children.
Happy Saabing
Matt
6 December 2005
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