Saab Automobile: Jet Engineers, the Elk Test and GM's Blocked China Sale

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

So if you buy a toaster, you just expect it to make toast, right?

SPEAKER_2 (0:03)

Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

It's just an appliance.

SPEAKER_2 (0:05)

It's a very simple, functional, completely transactional relationship.

SPEAKER_1 (0:09)

But what if you bought a consumer product, like a car, and psychologists later found out that you were literally 10 times more emotionally invested in it than the average consumer?

SPEAKER_2 (0:20)

10 times is a massive psychological difference for a car.

SPEAKER_1 (0:23)

Right, it's huge. And that is exactly what we are looking at today.

We've got a fascinating stack of sources compiled for you. Historical automotive archives, psychological case studies on brand loyalty, some really brutal corporate post mortems, all to impact the story of Saab Automobile.

SPEAKER_2 (0:40)

Yeah, the mission of this deep dive is really to figure out how a Swedish company that was born out of making World War II fighter planes somehow managed to cultivate one of the most fiercely eccentric customer bases in automotive history.

SPEAKER_1 (0:54)

And, well, unfortunately, we also have to look at why that exact uniqueness couldn't save them from the brutal realities of modern corporate capitalism.

SPEAKER_2 (1:02)

Which is such a tragedy, really. But to understand how any car company generates that level of psychological devotion, we have to trace their DNA all the way back to the start.

SPEAKER_1 (1:12)

Right, because they didn't start in a typical car garage.

SPEAKER_2 (1:15)

No, not at all. That DNA was forged in military hangars, not in Detroit or Stuttgart.

You know that famous marketing slogan they used later on, Born from Jets?

SPEAKER_1 (1:24)

Yeah, I remember those commercials.

SPEAKER_2 (1:25)

Well, it wasn't just a marketing gimmick, it was literal history. In 1937, this company called Svenska Aeroplan AB, which by the way is where we get the acronym Saab from, was set up in Sweden.

SPEAKER_1 (1:38)

And they had a very specific mission, right?

SPEAKER_2 (1:40)

Exactly. They had one highly specific purpose, which was building military aircraft for the Swedish Air Force. Sweden was trying to protect its strict neutrality as Europe was sliding rapidly toward the Second World War.

SPEAKER_1 (1:53)

So their entire foundational culture is rooted in aviation engineering. They aren't thinking about cup holders or consumer vehicles at all.

SPEAKER_2 (2:00)

Right. They're thinking about aerodynamics and survival.

SPEAKER_1 (2:03)

But then the war ends in the mid 1940s and suddenly that massive market for military fighter planes just completely evaporates. They need to pivot and they need to do it fast if they want to survive.

SPEAKER_2 (2:13)

Which is a terrifying position for a highly specialized manufacturing company.

SPEAKER_1 (2:18)

Yeah. So according to our sources in 1945, they initiate this internal automobile design project. They call it Project X9248, which eventually gets shortened to Project 92

I actually love the naming convention here.

SPEAKER_2 (2:34)

Oh, because it's so mundane.

SPEAKER_1 (2:35)

Exactly. It was called Project 92 simply because it was just the very next item on their production spreadsheet right after the Saab 91, which was like a single engine training plane.

SPEAKER_2 (2:46)

They literally just treated it like another aircraft project. I mean, they handed the entire automobile design to a team of aeronautical engineers. The crazy part is a lot of these guys did not even possess a driver's license.

SPEAKER_1 (2:58)

Wait, really?

SPEAKER_2 (2:58)

Yeah.

SPEAKER_1 (2:59)

The people designing the car couldn't even legally drive one.

SPEAKER_2 (3:02)

Nope. They approached the car exactly how they would approach an airplane. The result of that was this series of prototypes known as the Ursaab, which just translates to original Saab. Right.

By 1949, this evolves into their first real production model, the Saab 92 But because it was literally conceived by airplane designers, the thing was just packed with these extreme mechanical quirks. It completely defied the conventional automotive wisdom of the time.

SPEAKER_1 (3:30)

Yeah, it was super weird. For starters, it featured front wheel drive, which was highly unusual back then, and it was powered by a two-stroke engine.

SPEAKER_2 (3:38)

Which you usually find in motorcycles or lawnmowers.

SPEAKER_1 (3:42)

And driving a car with a two-stroke engine required a surprising amount of manual labor from the owner. You couldn't just roll up to the gas station, pump your gas, and drive away.

SPEAKER_2 (3:52)

Right, because there's no separate oil system.

SPEAKER_1 (3:54)

Yeah, the drivers literally had to measure and manually mix oil into the petrol tank themselves every single time they filled up, just to keep the engine lubricated.

SPEAKER_2 (4:03)

Which sounds exhausting to a modern driver. But the idiosyncrasies didn't stop there.

The transmission was totally bizarre, too. The early Saab models from the 92 up through the 96 featured this thing called a free-wheeling clutch mechanism.