Have Saab reintroduced hatchback yet?

Some car buyers.

I damn well CAN !

I reckon if Saab still had hatchback versions of the 9-3 and made a hatchback

9-5 they would sell a shedload more cars. It strikes me a truly perverse that a company that once sold lots of executive hatchbacks (for a while it was all they offered) has dropped them entirely. It was one of the brand strengths IMHO which GM simply can't understand (like many other things GM can't understand).

Graham

Prove it please.

Pillars *always* 'brace' the bodywork. It's their very function.

The size of the hole (beyond something really small) is no reliable guide.

Graham

Either way, Rover dealers won't have been offering >30% as a discount.

Either you worked for the owners of Rover or you have selective memory.

Wrong again.

Graham

In the "executive" sector, more than who don't.

It's not a difficult concept to grasp, I'm not sure why you're struggling with it.

Clearly, just not very well.

And yet so few other people do.

Why?

Because you like it? Because BMW's hatchbacks outsell their saloon?

Because you want to argue?

Does it not also strike you to be perverse that, hmm, say Jaguar, which for a long, long time would never sell a diesel, started selling diesels?

I was invited to leave a Jaguar showroom back in the late 1990s for asking when they'd sell a diesel for our diesel-only fleet.

So you believe that you're right and GM are wrong with regard to the sales figures of Saabs pre-saloon only and post-saloon only?

Good luck with that.

I think you're missing the point, though. Because the chassis doesn't flex, the suspension can be better tuned, as the engineers have a smaller amount of flex to worry about. Essentially then it can work "better."

And the ride is appalling. :)

Yes.

You're taking it to the extreme and I didn't put it very well. Because of the length of the chassis, a small movement in degrees can lead to a fairly chunky movement in millimetres. That's better. As the front of the car goes over a bump, if the chassis flexes, even by a tiny amount, this gives the car a loose or bouncy feeling. The suspension is softened as a result, otherwise you can get a nasty double bump sensation over an undulated road.

Because the suspension has been softened up for a decent ride, when you come to a corner it starts to flop about a bit. That's how my 9-3 feels - decent ride, bit floppy in twisty stuff.

Sorry to disappoint - but the strut brace is both subtle (unlike my Ka's brace, hehehe) and present in lots of modern stuff. The rear spoiler - is yours the larger, SE-style? - helps scrub the rear windscreen of water. We had four 9-3s and the S model didn't have such as effective rear windscreen scrub as my SE.

I didn't buy the SE because of the spoiler, of course... :)

Ford won't stop making the Focus. Actually - yeah - the Focus has a much, much stiffer chassis than the Escort, it rides and handles so much better, but it's also between one and two adults heavier...

And where's the proof of this ?

Previous Saab sales as shown in this thread showed precisely the opposite.

Besides, what's the point of reducing Saab to a BMW clone ?

Graham

No they didn't.

We've drifted away from the original point here. It had been suggested that saloons had better handling than hatchbacks because they had a smaller opening at the rear. If this extra large hole in the hatchback shell really was moving by such a large amount as to affect the suspension geometry, there would be enormous problems with the unstressed hatch trying to fill that hole whilst it constantly changed shape. This doesn't happen because the opening just isn't changing shape that much. If the chassis flex isn't being caused by the hatch opening then, even if it does affect the handling, it isn't a hatchback problem.

Just because lots of marketing departments have decided to fit one, doesn't make them worthwhile from any perspective other than selling cars. The one in the 9-3 is a particularly cynical example. It turns towards the rear and runs just a few inches away from the bulkhead. It's really not doing anything that the bulkhead wasn't already doing. It's not completely useless though. It makes a really good place to wedge the extension bar when you need to take the tension off the drive belt.

It's an Aero one - with a gap underneath.

Not sure about rear screen clearing, but whilst I was in a Saab dealership a while ago, they had a large poster proudly proclaiming that one of their upgraded spoilers increased the aerodynamic downforce at the rear of the car by a massive 40% thus giving the rear tyres "loads more grip". What it failed to mention was that the downforce only accounts for a vanishingly tiny proportion of the force on the rear tyres - the vast majority of course, comes from the weight of the car. what they should have said was "a completely insignificant amount of extra grip".

I completely ignored the spoiler on mine too. I bought it mainly because of the speaker grilles.

I think the Focus would be a bit small for me. I'm in Mondeo territory, but my 2.5L limit causes problems there. At the moment, If the 9-3 caught fire tomorrow, It looks like the top favorites for the replacement would be a Mazda6 MPS or a Skoda Octavia VRS...

Cheers,

Colin.

Eeyore ( snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

Perhaps, but the solid bar across the full width of the rear, half way up, complete with bonded glass above it, is.

Go and open the hatch of a 350Z for a fine demonstration.

Eeyore ( snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

List price in Sept '90? Well, there wasn't a GLS in the range. GL was £12,225, SRi £13,305, CD £14,725, GSi £16,730.

Yes, it only makes sense to quote the official list prices; there are (were) all sorts of other deals available, so the price you pay may vary considerable.

johannes ( snipped-for-privacy@size-85635457321546-fitter.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

Oh, indeed. Supply and demand is all... In that very magazine, there's an interview with Bob Eaton, then head of GM Europe, in which he says that they could easily have sold many more Cavaliers, but they had serious supply problems. Doesn't sound like 30% discounts would have been readly available.

Actually, given that we're talking about '88-'90. '88 would have been the last of the Mk2 Chavalier/Ascona C, which had been replaced by the much, much better Mk3/Vectra A by '90, so it's not really an apples-for-apples, given that they probably would have been desperate to shift the last of the old ones in '88, so discounting very heavily.

There's also a piece about how the (freshly launched) Vx/Opel Calibra would be sold in the US under the Saab badge...

They changed the model range.

Different specs but I'd say the SRi would have been the closest

Graham

The mark 3 didn't come along for another 4-5 months after I got mine. Supply of that was slow to ramp up too plus the range was limited so I disagree about them being desperate to shift stock.

And the USA is now finally going to be getting the Astra and Vectra under the Saturn brand AIUI.

Graham

What this?

You're not seriously suggesting that thing in the boot was put there by any kind of engineer are you? It will have been "designed" by either a stylist or a marketing man.

If they'd been serious about bracing the shell at the back, then they'd have done it diagonally. About the least effective thing they could do would be to brace it straight across from one side to the other. Their thinking in this case seems to have been along the lines of "How can we create the maximum visual impact without altering the shell stiffness too much".

Incidentally, the 9-3 hatch has a thick heavy bar running behind the top of the back seats to hold the seat belt reels. It's completely unable to flex or stretch, yet it sits perfectly happily in its latches, quietly and constantly proving that, if it were a strut-brace or a steel parcel shelf, it would be doing nothing worthwhile.

Cheers,

Colin.

That's to provide additional strength to the rear seat, such that the 80 kg or whatever of beer doesn't end up in the front footwell...

Just on the 9-3, has yours suffered from the front bulkhead separation issue (yet)?

Eeyore ( snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

They've had 'em for years - the Mk2 Ashtray was the Pontiac LeMans, and the current Vectra's the Chev Malibu.

What issue is this?

Charles