SAAB Gets Ready for Another Crushing Failure

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 3, 6:36AM EST

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

For some reason, the latest owner of the SAAB car business believes it can resurrect an auto brand that is among the most thoroughly destroyed in the past several years. Saab owner, the Chinese-backed National Electric Vehicle Sweden AB, thinks it can take a vehicle that has fallen into obscurity and put it up against the dozens of other brands, all of which are larger, and many of which sell cars around the world with substantial marketing budgets. It will not work.

The company described the launch:

National Electric Vehicle Sweden AB has started production of the Saab 9-3 Aero Sedan with a petrol engine. Sales are initially focused in China with a small number of vehicles being sold directly from Nevs to Swedish customers via the Nevs’ website.

The car that is produced is a high-spec Saab 9-3 Aero Sedan with a 220 hp 2.0-liter turbo, a previously recognized high-performance engine of the Saab cars.

Online sales? A trick that only widely popular Tesla Motor Corp. (NASDAQ: TSLA) has managed, and its sells only a few thousand cars a year, for the time being at least.

The company added:

To ensure our high quality and the supply chain functions, the production rate will be very modest, about ten cars a week initially, and then gradually the pace will be increased to meet customers’ demand.

The best way to look at the statement is that Saab knows full well that it will be lucky to sell those 10 cars, even in the manufacturer’s home market.

Broken car brands do net get second lives. Some proof of that are the deaths of Volvo, American Suzuki and Mitsubishi Motors in the United States. And if anything, China, the largest car market in the world, is even more competitive that America, as every global manufacturer desperately fights for market share against both its global competitors and Chinese manufacturers. Saab will be squeezed out before it can get its initial batch of cars off the assembly line.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.