Mr Steve Nicholl Director, Sales & Marketing for Saab Asia Pacific

IN the past, Saab cars were known for being unique (or some might even say quirky) from other cars. Today, however, we see Saab building more mainstream products that share their platforms with Chevrolet and Subaru cars, like the 9-7X and 9-2X respectively. Is maintaining its uniqueness still important or is Saab taking a more diversified approach?

The simple answer is “yes” and “yes”. When people buy a Saab, they are buying into its distinctiveness. They don’t want the same car as everybody else. But yet, with the 9-7X for example, we found that 40 percent of the customers who were leaving Saab were going into an SUV. So we asked them: “If we had a car in this segment, would you stay with Saab?” And the answer was a resounding “Yes”.

With the 9-2X, the market is younger and also getting bigger. Again, we needed a car to address
this group of customers in a very short time.

Saab customers are known to be very sophisticated and car-savvy. How will they take to these two cars which appear to have borrowed heavily from the other companies?

What cars like the 9-2X and 9-7X do for us is buy us time to develop cars with a lot of Saab character in them. And the new cars will eventually replace these two models.

If the 9-7X and 9-2X are intended for the US market initially, what can our market expect from Saab in the near future and when?

We have different variants of the 9-3 programme coming to market within the next year or so. We’ve shown the Sport Hatch concept at various motor shows and the response has been positive, so I won’t be giving too much away to say that something like that will be in the pipeline in the not-too-distant future.

With all the resources of parent company General Motors at your disposal, it can be easy to lose the car’s character in other platforms. How do you ensure that a Saab remains a Saab?

Design is very important in this case and we always try to maintain a Scandinavian character. Performance is also another key. It’s not necessarily about high speed but rather about overtaking performance, power on tap and the handling to cope with this reserve power. And safety. It is a religion at Saab. I don’t think we can produce an unsafe car if we tried!