Carlos Ghosn's wildly successful turn-around of Nissan (+/- 40% owned by
Renault) is to end April 1st.  Turn him loose on Saab!

Here in Australia the 'ultimate bad taste gansta-look vehicle' is the PT
Cruiser. Damn those are f@#king ugly cars.

Saab would benefit from being a seperate marque all on it's own again. I
don't see any reason why GM wants Saab except (for reasons I outlined in a
couple of posts earlier) because Saab has rights to technology that GM wants
to own. Most notably with regard to turbochargers and some aspects of engine
design, but there's bound to be a lot more than just that.

It's typical GM - just look at all their 'trucks' (aka SUV's, or whatever
the 'giant pickup' market wants to label them) and see how that shape is
coming into every new vehicle GM's designers stick their noses into.

Regards,

Craig.

In Sweden the Saab/Opel dealer network is not separated. Most Saab
dealers also sell Opel, although in some cases they have Opel cars in
the basement/ground floor and Saab cars on the first floor.

The question would be how to obtain all parts that are now "GM common"
parts (brakes, the new 6 cyl engine, etc.)

Volvo already tried cooperating with Renault with little success. Saab,
being another Swedish company, could possibly have the same problems in
terms of culture, management style etc. Saab/GM and Volvo/Ford
cooperation is probably simpler although there is a difference in
management levels as Swedish engineers are much more independent in
their work. Basically a US engineer does what the boss tells him to do
even if he knows that the boss is wrong. A Swedish engineer at the
lowest level typically makes makes the same kind of decisions as the
lowest level US manager and is more prone to put in question the
decisions of his nearest manager. Thus a Swedish department manager
typically discusses best with a US division manager as they are on the
same level from a responsibility point of view.

The Japanese have a similar way of working as the Swedes. Decisions are
more taken on consensus basis rather than one manager deciding in most
aspects (as is the typical French way of working). So why not, a
Saab/Nissan cooperation could be successful. Saab has already used a
Nissan automatic transmission in the 9-5 and why not use more Japanese
parts. These are anyway known to have much better quality than US parts,
just look at the semiconductor market: it was not until the Japanese
manufacturers entered the market that quality and reliability of complex
semiconductor products like memories really improved. The US
manufacturers were not fast enough in improving their quality and
quickly lost most of the market.

Generally Japanese cars are considered to be quite reliable, this can
also be seen in annual statistics from mandatory tests. From several
people in this group it seems that GM reputation is quite bad in terms
of quality (I've only noticed it on the really poor fast-rusting brakes
of the 9-5). Thus, Saab being sold to Nissan should improve the car
quality compared to a GM ownership.