GM'S Sale of Saab Is Officially No-Go

By Marc Stern

Marc Stern

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Indeed, the Saab marque became a cult car, of sorts, led by the 96, had a small legion of supporters who were diehard Saab fans. However, this legion of fans also encouraged Saab to expand its sales into the U.S. market and for a long time, they had a small, but respectable piece of the imported pie with cars such as the 9-3 and its successors.

They were the first import to make widespread use of turbocharging to extract maximum performance from their four-cylinder powerplant. Indeed, they were one of the automakers that learned how important a dense fuel/air charge was to maximum turbo performance, while, at the same time, realizing that turbolag was also a major problem with turbocharging.

(There are two types of power add-ons for engines that make smaller engines believe they are larger engines, theres supercharging more correctly turbosupercharging and turbocharging. Supercharging, which has been around since the 1930s, uses an engine-driven impeller system to increase the fuel/air charge in a cylinder and thus increase the specific power output of an engine. It all operates on the intake side of the engine.

(Seeing that some engineers saw an area with undeveloped potential to provide more power to an engine without taking power from the engine a criticism of supercharging. Engineers designed impellers that worked on the exhaust side of the engine and were driven by the exhaust stream of the manifold. They used a series of venturi restrictions to increases the stream flow so that they effectively added to the power of the exhaust flow to turn the impeller.

(The impeller, interestingly enough, sat on both sides of the manifold. It worked by turned the blades on the exhaust side that, in turn, turned the blades on the intake side so that the power of the fuel/air charge heading toward the cylinders was increased. The key here was that there was no mechanical linkages involved to rob power from the engine as supercharging required an extra set of gears and another driveshaft to turn the impeller and increase power.

(The turbo versus supercharging argument was heated around the need for the extra engine hardware and while supercharging aficionados noted that supercharging was instant, turbocharging supporters were also bellowing that they were using free or waste energy to power the engine so their system was better. They carefully failed to point out that there was significant turbolag as it took time for the impeller blade to spin up and that it also required a dense charge to provide the kind of power that a supercharger could provide instantly.

(It took Saab engineers about five years to dial out significant turbolag by using unequal length runners and other tricks such as added turbocoolers to keep the charge dense before they could really begin to argue that their method of doing things was the right way. These changes, by the way, added to the complexity of the turbo system used and made it a plumbers delight.)

Saab also had another interesting quirk that added to its cult status, aside from its terminal torque steer the tendency of a front-drive car to jump to the right on hard acceleration that took years to dial out and that was its ignition. The ignition switch was located in the center floor console. On its five-speed, Saab required you to insert the key, engage the clutch and then turn the car over. When you were through driving you first had to ensure that the Saab was in reverse, engage the clutch and then turn the key all the way to the left to extract it. Later Saabs, after the company was purchased by General Motors, had more Americanized ways of ignition use.