Phil Cooke

sounds like a great lesson for small churches to learn.

The main thing GM should have learned was to have never bought SAAB. It was a fear motivated purchase based on the fact that Ford purchased Volvo just months earlier and it was known SAAB was up for sale and BMW was heavily rumored to be the primary suitor. The reason GM bought SAAB was because GM wanted an additional presence in Europe besides Opel and Vauxhall because Ford was gobbling up market share with Ford, Jaguar, Aston Martin, Land Rover, and now Volvo.

It was originally supposed to be an “exchange of technologies” where SAAB would bring to GM their “world-class” turbocharging technology, their “safety” technologies, and their vast access to Artic Circle tundra lands where GM could secretly test future pickup truck engineering / reliability without being hounded by spy photographers in Canada / Alaska in extreme cold weather. GM, on the other hand would bring to SAAB their dealer network, likeminded global car platforms, advanced quality/reliability techniques, and a V6 that was powerful, fuel-efficent, and reliable which was something GM was well known for at that time.

What happened was that SAAB owners hated the move believing that SAAB would just become another ‘unreliable GM product” and acted like alot of “KJV1611 onlysts” who believe any deviance is quality and integrity compromise. They wanted their own quirky and distinctive product line with their own platforms and components unshared which in a business sense was hard and impratical to some degree for GM to do.

The transisition took a very long time to release some fresh and new products to the marketplace and when SAAB did, the first product that the GM-SAAB era produced was the 9-2 known as the SAABARU because it was literally a Japanese built Subaru Impreza with Subaru’s engine, interior, and SAAB badging but without four distinctive SAAB quirks

(1): The dark green dashboard night lights (they were white)

(2): The grid vent louvers with the turn knob (they were the flip louvers with a directional lever)

(3): The keyswitch in the center console near the transmission shift lever (it was on the steering column)

(4): The bonnet (opens towards the front grille) hood. (the hood opened towards the windshield)

Their die-hard loyalists literally gave up on the company and hounded GM so hard to the point where GM had to develop a ‘retrofit kit” to address the first three items on the first year models (the second year models were corrected) and paid the dealers a flat-fee to install the crash kits to have green dashboard lights, grid vent louvers, and the keyswitch in the center console to make the car more SAAB like to try to attract loyal SAAB buyers.

The loyality went further downhill when the re-designed 9-3 shared the platform as the Pontiac G6, Chevy Malibu, Saturn Aura. However, the performance suspension package of the 9-3 was crossed over to the high end Pontiac G6 GTP and it is a known aftermarket do-it-yourself modification for the middle tier G6 GT owners (who are mechanically inclined) to purchase the 9-3 suspension parts and install them on their G6 GT cars. The 9-7 shared the same platform as the Chevrolet Trailblazer and GMC Envoy which fueled the SAAB “purists” anger.

But they got items 1-3 correct the first time around on the 9-3 and 9-7

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On a side note in reference to the first point, Ford had a brutal time whe it purchased Jaguar because the move was so detested by Jaguar employees that Jaguar’s own “die hard” employees were literally sabotaging the quality, reliability, and workmanship of the car because they hated the fact that the “Yanks” purchased a “British Heirloom”.

Same thing happened at Land Rover and Aston Martin to some degree when Ford purchased those companies.

It got to the point where Ford had to start monitoring the production lines with secret cameras and after hours quality control personnel  and eventually fire people on the spot in order to get the quality back up again. Ford really sold Jaguar not because of the recession, but because the reputation of a shoddy quality car in the Ford/Jaguar years was a near impossible task to over come even with the X-type that was built on a Euro Ford platform but looked too much like a Taurus. Their loyalists left Jaguar also and a new set of customers started buying them. Even purists and collectors do not want a Ford Jaguar.