It was announced yesterday that the auto brand Saab, unable to find a buyer, is being closed.
I blame this death on the dimwits at GM and the Mammonites at Saab.
Saab was a quirky, unique little car that appealed basically to Ivy league iconoclasts who lived withing 25 miles of New York, Boston and San Francisco.
When Saab was independent, they sold about 30,000 cars a year in the US and as a company they made a decent amount of money. Then greed intervened. Saab sold itself to GM. GM decided the car brand was too quirky to move enough units, so they focus-grouped and blanderized it so it would have broader appeal and they wound up with a machine that appealed to no one. This year something like 8,000 Saabs were sold in the US.
Saab was a great little car company for about 25 years. Then someone decided it wasn't enough to be little. And today they are no more.
Sad.
It's extra sad for the thousands of people in Trollhattan, Sweden. and the surrounding towns, who worked at SAAB. For generations. Suppliers are closing as well. Smal industries that maske parts. There's even a risk that Trollhattan as a town could go the way of many towns up north. When mining and other industries disappeared people had to leave, and left behind an older generation, that slowly died. Ghost towns today.
ReplyDeleteI was born at the hospital in Trollhattan. I once worked on the SAAB account.