New wheels?

Which sizes you can use you should be able to find in the manual for your

9-5.

On my 2002 9-3 I have 205/50/R16 summer tires on aluminum wheels and

185/65/R15 winter tires on steel rims.

/Bengt

Use care. I'm fairly certain that you can not use the 15" wheels on the 95 Aero due to the larger front brake calipers. I believe you can use the 16" or 17" alloys from most 95's and possibly 9-3's to mount up some snows.

regards Red

Many thanks for the reply.

The dealer is trying to talk me into buying wheels and tires from them. He says I should NOT use steel rims 'cuz the two different metals (wheel and brake system) will cause corrosion. Does this sound possible?

Gordon

Sounds like bullsh1t to me. The wheels bolt to the brake disks, which are are cast-iron, so steel wheels are closer to being the same metal than alloys are.

It's almost as if the dealer stands to make some profit out of selling you alloys!

Cheers,

Colin.

It's like asking your barber if he thinks you need a haircut...

It's not complete bullshit, it depends on what type of bolts you have (yet another of all the 9-5 design errors like crankcase ventilation, SID etc.!). With the original bolts, without a washer, the bolts may break if you switch between alu and steel rims and if you are not _very_ careful when cleaning the disks each time you change rims (clean carefully and use copper paste). Saab has changed to a new bolt type with built-in washer for those who changes between alu and steel rims. You should get these bolts free of charge from Saab.

You can get a set of 16" wheels and winter tires for your car. Look here:

You can either get alloys for about $110 ea or steel wheels and hubcaps for about half the cost.

The 16" snow tires tend to be kind of pricey at about $100 ea. for the better brands.

YMMV,

-Fred W

I use a separate tire/wheel alloy set for winter. I like the looks of alloys year around.

2004 9-3 Aero

Eeeeh.... hate to bring facts into things and all, but there isn't an auto manufacturer out there who doesn't offer alloy wheels to go on steel hubs. Its not a "design error", it's a "Saab saw that there is a potential for all cars with this mixture, and chose to proactively deal with theirs" kind of thing.

Yes, the existance of said recall shows further that, a) they care, and b) steel wheels exist for Saabs.

Dave Hinz

1. Steel wheels do exist for Saabs, but Saab only has steel wheels for non-Aero models.
2. The recall also excluded the Aero model (because of 1.)

My experience is that the problem is significantly aggravated on the 9-5 compared with for instance the 9000. When changing to steel winter wheel you have to work much harder to remove the rust on a 9-5 hub than on a

9000 (or C900) hub. You would expect that for each new model the manufacturer would learn how to improve the technical solutions. OK if the new bolt is one way of doing it but it seems more like a panic solution than a proactive solution to a known problem.

I haven't tried it on a Saab yet, but I've switched back and forth between alloy and steel rims on my Volvo and have never had any problems in that area.

That would be the expected observation unless someone is interfering with the manufacturer. The 9-5 inherited the design of the hubs and brake disks from GM.

Yeah, but like any other car, if you don't take care of your hubs, they'll rust where you don't want 'em to. Nothing unusual about a wire brush when you switch wheels, I shouldn't think. Maybe that's just me?

Dave Hinz

I don't have any alloy/steel rim problems with my Volvo. But then the Volvo is rear wheel drive with the B21FT engine :-) I have not has any problems with steel rims with my Classic Saabs.

I suspected that. This probably also goes with the parking brake. On the

9-5 you hear a "clonk" sound (same sound as you hear on a Vectra) if you try to apply that brake when the car is rolling, not recommended in the car manual! I miss the old design of the 9000 where you could "fresh up" the rear brake discs after the car had been parked for a week or two (not to mention the fun you could have on slippery roads making 180 or 360 degree turns in a very short distace).

My experience is that you have to regularly brake quite hard in order to keep the 9-5 rear brake discs clean and free from rust. This result in an unnecessary wear-out of the front brake pads, as the front discs are maintained in a nice shape by ordinary, not too agresive driving.

Maybe I sound a bit disappointed but I belong to the category of 9-5 owners that think this guy;

is lucky not having more problems with the car (anybody recognises the display problem, the frozen parking brake wire due to a broken sealing, weak rear suspension, ignition module etc. ?) It seems that the GM interference has not improved the quality of the car. I just checked the repair costs (excluding normal service like oil change, brake pads etc.): a 9-5 with less than 100 000 km costs more than the sum of five other Saabs, of three different models, with a total of almost 1 000 000 km.

True.

It is not just you. I wirebrush the rim/disk surfaces and keep them dry, use some aluminium/aluminum paste on the hub center, keep one set of wheel screws for summer and one for winter (the unused set is kept in individual compartments in plastic boxes, one box for each wheel), use a torque wrench to tighten the screws, and fill the tires/tyres with air from my own compressor. Pedantic? Perhaps, but I do like my wheels to stay attached to the car.

Your statement about GM's takeover of Saab has many supporters.

That is why I have a Classic 900.

Look at the problems with the current Saabs - most are related to the use of GM components. GM is pushing to use even more "common" components, even to the point of punishing the Saab engineers who resist by re-assigning them to other plants. The Wall Street Journal had an article about how the Saab engineers made changes to the 9-3, which just happened to earn the highest safety rating. The article cited the changes made, changes which contributed to the safety rating. In the next paragraph it wrote how these engineers were "rewarded" by being reassigned. At GM no good deed goes unpunished . . .

Perhaps GM wants to improved the "bottom line" by selling cars that don't hold up in crashes (so you will buy a new car instead of getting it fixed) and by making cars that need expensive repairs (so GM and GM dealers make money on the repairs). Will this approach work and save Saab? I really don't know.

Maybe they are trying to get back to the Opel quality of the sixties, with models like Opel "Corrodore" etc.. There were some nice poems about Opel in those days. One in Swedish covering the corrosion problems:

Kör Opel, bli belåten. Se naturen genom plåten.

Difficult to translate, but the spirit maybe something like:

Drive Opel and be happy, during your weekly visit at the local scrappy.