Like any good brain eating zombie, the Saab brand has been staggering around listlessly for a couple years now. They have not produced a car in months, have not paid their workers in a longer period than that and now it appears the last ditch plan to save the company has been struck dead by GM. Saab’s fate was hanging on an infusion of Chinese cash into the company, which General Motors refused to sign off on, citing concerns about their market share in China and the fact that the Chinese buyer would have access to their tooling and technology from the Saab line.
The company currently has a Swedish government appointed caretaker who is overseeing the “restructuring” of the organization. His job just got a lot easier because with no money coming in, no hope of any foreign investment being OK’d by all of the stake holders in the company, and a 0.0% chance of developing new models in the near future, it is over.
In some ways it would have been better if the company had just slid under the waves when GM cut it loose in 2009 because it has bounded from disaster to disaster since then and lots of people have lost jobs and hope in waiting for a return to glory for the quirky Swedish automaker. (It is a government requirement the work quirky appear in any story about Saab…look it up, that’s on the books).
The caretaker has said that he will announce in the next couple of days what the final fate for the company is. We’re interested to see what happens with the tooling and equipment that GM does not want to see go to China. Will they buy it back? Will it be destroyed? Stay tuned!
A real Saab story