The Saab we knew and loved as a cute and quirky car brand died in 2011. Since then there have been a few gasps of hope for its return, but nothing serious has ever materialized. Today we have a new line item for the Swedish automaker’s post-mortem history: The Trollhättan Saab factory’s presses and manufacturing equipment are for sale. Anybody want to try and start stamping out 9-3s again?
Saab, the company, is still very much alive. It employs about 22,000 people selling fighter jets, weapon systems, and other tools of war. Saab the automaker has had a rougher ride. “It’s a really brilliant brand. It’s probably one of the biggest brand mismanagement stories in the history of the automotive industry,” said business analyst Tim Urquhart back in 2010 when the company was collapsing.
As most car nerds know, Saab was fully bought by General Motors in 2000—GM had had a major stake since 1989. Though the car company completely flatlined in 2011, the GM acquisition is when Saab stopped being Saab. Spyker, a small Dutch brand you might recognize from its exceptionally eccentric supercars, bought Saab in 2010 and, sadly, only presided over its ultimate demise. In 2012 it tried to sue GM for screwing them over by intentionally bankrupting Saab but was not successful. Spyker itself went bankrupt just a couple of years later.
Saab Automobiles got scooped up by a Chinese-Swedish investment group called NEVS (for National Electric Vehicle Sweden), and in 2013 it looked like the assembly lines were going to start cranking out 9-3s again. There was a brief almost-revival, and a tiny batch of super cool 9-5 Sport Combi models were made but serious production was never achieved. NEVS got as far as showing off some prototypes and promising to put cars on the road by 2018, but … no. Actually, there was one (1) new Saab sold in 2018—a 2011 model-year diesel, manual, 9-3 station wagon that somehow ended up at a dealership in Italy.
Ultimately seeking bankruptcy protection, NEVS lost the rights to the Saab car brand name in 2014. A company called Evergrande, which was a big Faraday Future investor, ended up acquiring a majority stake in NEVS in 2019. The last I heard about that was that the Swedish small-batch supercar company Koenigsegg was linking up with them, possibly to try and build a mass-market car, I guess potentially utilizing the Trollhättan factory that hasn’t made a car in about a decade.
The Trollhättan Saab factory, which built its first car in 1947 after the company was set up for airplane-making a decade earlier, was finally given up on by NEVS completely in 2023.
Whew, that’s a lot of auto-industry contexts we just speed-ran! Today, Saab was in my inbox for the first time in forever because a company called Surplex, which liquidates all kinds of industrial stuff, is hawking the stamping tools and presses that occupy the Trollhättan ex-Saab facility.
You can scroll through the listings on Surplex’s site and see that some of these machines date back to the ’60s. They must have been used back when Saab was cool.
Basically, we’re witnessing Saab’s last part out here. There are a couple of smaller presses that I actually could imagine a rich car nerd acquiring for fun, but most of the equipment is colossal, requiring serious industrial space to house and operate. As for shipping it, I can’t imagine what kind of costs would be involved in dismantling and moving any of this stuff. Though it may very well be less than buying a brand-new car factory. That’s the angle Surplex is taking with its sales pitch—get your own automaker off the ground cheap with used stamping equipment!
There are no prices listed, but sales project manager Oscar Soler Monte’s contact information is easy to find if you’d like to make a bid.
Got any ideas on what to do with Saab’s old manufacturing equipment? Drop the author a line at [email protected].
