Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 21:46:22 -0400 From: "Tex" <texnospamm101.org> Subject: Re: The C900 hatch to make a comeback!
"Paul Halliday" <pjghnospamyonder.co.uk> wrote in message news:BEA59895.13DDF%pjghnospamyonder.co.uk... > Or an opinionated rant? Take a look in the mirror, eh? You can be assured, that if I indeed do rant, that it will be about something I actually know something about and something that actually exists and is concrete. The alleged new 900 neither exists nor is concrete in vision. Call me an optimist, but I see that Saab has a great opportunity here....to dig into its past for inspiration of a whole new, but also retro, model. > That certainly was not what he was saying. Given the recent propensity for > the SAAB badge to be placed onto slightly re-worked existing GM models is > perhaps why the author of that thread was incensed by the original > article. If you've actually followed GM and Saab in recent years you would know that these rebadged cars are only temporary until Saab comes up with its own offerings in those market segments. > I know that platform sharing is no new thing to SAAB and that buying in > significant parts of the overall engineering is no new thing to SAAB. The > freedom to develop and re-work that engineering is something SAAB have > done > very well through the majority of the history of the marque. Totally agree. Kind of sounds like they are the unofficial "cover band" of the automotive manufacturing world? ;-) >>> it won't be totally (and unprofitably) over-engineered, >> >> Why should Saab not make money? > > Maybe re-read that one? > SAAB should make money. That would be great. So would engineering > autonomy. I think the debate lies in how you define "engineering autonomy". > Right .. Okay. What do SAAB offer Subaru? How much SAAB went into the 9-2? > My bet is that it will be a shared next generation Impreza that will be > marketed as both SAAB (in less power form) and Subaru. I'm surprised they just didn't go with a variant of the Epsilon II platform. From what I've read, it's already adaptable to both the next gen 9-3 and 9-5 cars (in AWD configuration). This would presumably mean slightly different platform sizes. So why not just have a slightly smaller version of the same platform for a retro 900? Doesn't seem very unreasonable given the car is still 3 years away from launch day. - tex
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