In the brand’s over half-century of selling cars, Saab enjoyed great success in New England, where its sophisticated image and superior handling in snow proved popular with many upper-middle class town and country dwellers alike. Saabs have always been especially common sights in the affluent Back Bay and Beacon Hill neighborhoods of Boston, even as they become a greater investment to own and maintain.
The second generation 9-3 may have been less Saab-unique and more GM parts bin than its predecessors, but it still found fans among loyal Saab owners, many of whom still keep them running as opposed to moving on. I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to photograph these two fraternal twins.
Conversely, I wonder if Saab owners wear Bostonians? I wonder if the same owner owns these two, one of the last of the true believers. Or just someone who got a screaming deal at the shutdown.
The 9-3 was getting awfully long in the tooth towards the end there, that mid-cycle refresh (or was it the second refresh?) once again to my eyes ended up ruining the looks of the car. Honda seems to manage this phenomenon without fail, I can’t think of a refresh from Honda that I prefer to the original. On the Saab, the rear taillights look especially ungainly to my eyes. Overall the shape just got more and more anonymous over the years.
In your comment, you mention the possibility of the same owner for the pair of Saabs. I notice the Silver Saab has a personalized license plant ” PM-1″. If the photographer happen to take a detail picture of the second car, we could possibly solve this riddle.
Brendan, any chance you captured the license plate of the black Saab???
The black one just had a standard issue Mass. plate
I actually thought head and taillights and grille that came with this facelift looked pretty cool, though they still couldn’t hide how old this car was getting even back in ’08.
Agree with you on the Honda’s facelifts. They always know how to spice up a several year old design.
Actually I meant it the other way around, I always prefer the original design! Had trouble writing that sentence, too early…
So you prefer the ’03 Accord to the ’06? If so I think you’re in the decided minority on that one.
In the case of, say the ’82 Accord versus the ’84, I’m right there with you.
And then there are ones where I can’t even identify what changed, like the mid-cycle on the 4th-gen (’88-’91) Civic. Or was there even a refresh?
I’m comfortable being in the minority Remember, I like Saab’s and VW’s and older Audi’s too…. Yep, 2003 over 2006 Accord but I didn’t love the ’03 either until the ’06 came out, then I began to appreciate the ’03 more…That whole generation is probably my least favorite from a styling standpoint. Not sure about the 4th gen Civic, if there was a change, it was very subtle.
I have a ’07 9-3, the last year before the refresh, and I prefer its looks to the ’08 refresh. I felt at the time that it was one of the best looking sedans of the previous 10 or 15 years. The refresh of the taillights was OK (all they did was change from red to clear lenses), but the changes to the front were not very good. The headlights acquired a desperate look, and they put a clamshell hood on it…the line is visible from the side and gives the front end a droopy profile.
I agree – I thought the refresh cheapened the overall design of the car. Clear taillights scream Boy Racer/Altezza; the clamshell hood lines did little to de-accentuate the FWD proportions.
Growing up in the northeast is where I fell in love with Saabs…they’re pretty rare down here in Texas, moreso since they disappeared in 2009. Certainly more of a cold weather car.
Saabs of this vintage are really cheap around here, but they all seem to have noisy engines/blown engines or bad transmissions.
I liked my ’91 900s, HATED the ’96 900s with all of its crappy GM engineering.
If there was a nice, clean, late production 9000 around here, I’d snap it up in a heartbeat.
Boston ..Snow belt with lots of doctors ..Saab was made for them.
Doctors are supposed to be superhuman; why do they need a car at all when they can fly? After all, they must work 80+ hour weeks doing life-critical things, whereas mere truckers get busted for that.
These days, I think that Audi is the “Bostonian” car. Leaving aside SUVs, the Audis are obviously classy, but avoid some of the nouveau-riche baggage of BMW and Mercedes.
Cool find, Brendan! Until very recently, my younger brother and his wife had two 2nd-generation 9-3’s just like these! White and dark grey. They recently traded hers toward a Subaru Outback. Combined with my older brother’s 1st generation 9-3, and my younger brother’s previous 900, we’ve been a four-SAAB family.
My DD is an ’07 9-3, which I bought (predictably, I suppose) when I lived in Boston. I don’t see many of them in upstate NY where I now live, but last weekend while in Boston I saw enough of them to make me wonder why Saab went out of business. I even parallel parked behind one, replicating the scenario pictured above.
I often bristle when I hear the “GM parts bin” label put on the car. It sure as heck doesn’t drive or feel like a GM car. The fact is that Saab frequently borrowed or shared platforms throughout its existence, so this generation wasn’t unusual in that regard. This feels like one of those standard narratives that gets attached to a car early on and is repeated ad nauseum (although Brendan usually provides a fresh perspective in his writing). The other half of this narrative says it’s a shame GM shut down the brand after it finally figured out how to do a Saab with the new 9-5 in 2010. But that car, despite excellent styling, drove much more like generic GM that the 9-3 ever did.
Overall, I think this generation 9-3 was a reasonably worthy successor to the 99 / 900 that preceded it. Sure, it lost some of its prior character and uniqueness, but for what car was this not the case over that same period?
Great comments. I too was vexed with the GM-parts-bin Frankenstein reputation – it certainly didn’t drive like an Epsilon II vehicle. If only parts were only Epsilon II cheap!
Now the current Chinese electric version of the 9-3…THAT’S a real Frankensaab.
We have an ’04, so far, it’s been good to drive. On the “parts bin,” the major parts seem pretty rock solid, and provide good performance, though perhaps not competitive with the E46 BMW. I do wish they had found window regulators from somewhere else in the GM parts bin, as those seem rather flimsy.
So, how prone to sludging and going kaboom are these engines? I think of them as being in the same league as the VW 1.8t and Chrysler 2.7L…avoid at all cost.
I would hate to give them a bum rap, but if it’s deserved, so be it.
Yes l agree with that. I work at a busy suburban shop in a upper middle class area west of St.Louis. It is interesting to review owner repair expenses in our system over a six or seven yr span on some Saabs or as you mentioned VAG group turbo models. It seems to me that 100 to 120,000 might be a good trade in point. If you want to go for 200k miles it’s going to cost you.
I worked at Plaza Motors for several years, in beautiful Creve Coeur, MO…looking at the money spent on mechanical repairs on some of these cars was astounding…didn’t help that some service writers got a little heavy-handed with recommending repairs…one MB service writer had some folks convinced that they needed front brake pads and rotors every 10,000 miles because their 190e’s and 300e’s were such high performance vehicles…they called her the “velvet fist”. That, and $200 oil changes, added up fast.
I for one lament the demise of Saab … I note how few you see in the US now, I wonder where they all went. I did notice that on the north east coast there were more around than the west coast. I guess it has a lot to do with the driving conditions.
The 2010 models of the 9-3 are spectacular cars and give little problems.
KJ in Oz
The funny thing about Saabs is that a Saab with a poor reliability record still gets praised by it’s owners but a Buick owner with the same reliability record gets Toyota religion and never looks back, and never quits bitching about the Buick.
Anyone who buys a European car knows they’re not getting Japanese reliability. Meanwhile, we’ve been inundated with JD Powers and Buick’s reputation. For a variety of reasons, people perceive European cars as special (even little Fiat). Buicks, not so much.
Like many sources of automotive ratings (i.e. Consumer Reports), JD Power must be taken with a grain of salt. JD Power ratings are survey based, which depending on the individuals surveyed, can skew data significantly, even with a large pool. How enthusiastic and knowledgeable of cars the typical owner of a brand is makes a huge difference.
It still perplexes me how Jaguar jumped from the bottom to a top three spot in on of JD Power’s surveys this year. I don’t think their quality improved that much over night.