Chinese save Swedish car company, again.

Last time, I talked about how we, the Dutch and especially Victor Muller messed up Saab (to be precise, here). And as promised this post now gets its part two, because one thing I noticed that the Chinese transformed from poor copiers of European car companies to owners of European car companies. Volvo, and now Saab are both owned by China and to some extent Land Rover and Jaguar also went Asian as they are (quite successfully) owned by Tata).

When the Volvo brand became available as Ford was aiming to sell it, it soon became known that Geely was the preferred buyer by Ford. Many feared that the decent Swedish brand would go down when it would fall into Chinese hands, mainly because the previous attempts to get into the European market were not at all successful. No, not at all.

Yet two years after the deal, all is more than fine at Volvo. Not a long time ago they showed what the Volvo of the future might look like and it was not very Labradoresque. Admitted, it did look a bit like an Audi from the back, but it shows that the brand is handled with care.


Still, there is no guarantee to success, take for instance the acquirance of MG Rover by SAIC and the Nanjing group. To the relief of everyone they decided that production would still take place in the famous Longbridge factory in the UK, and that new models would be developed. They were, and the end result was the MG6. It would go on sale in the UK in 2011 (it did) and would be sold Europe-wide when it would turn out to be successful. Guess how many have been sold in the UK, 10.000? 1000? No. 242 from January to October. Bentley sold four times as many cars in the same period.

Probably this is caused by the dated quality used on 'the Six'. The MG6 was based on the Roewe 550, which saw the light of day because SAIC had acquired a license to build Rover 75 look-a-likes. The Rover 75 was appreciated by the British public, no doubt about that. But when you are building a budget luxury saloon based on technology originating from 1999, you are not doing it right. Even the term 'Budget Luxury Saloon' sounds strange, a bit like 'Night School Trained Brain Surgeon'.

In the end it is all about how the new owner approaches the brand. For some it is about continuing the brand itself, or helping it into the future like we see with Jaguar and Volvo. Others might see it as an easy access into the European market, lifting on the good name the brand has. Whether the Saab take over will be a success? I don't know. General Motors seems to have an awful lot of doubt about the take over by two small dealer networks in China.

Surprisingly, Saab Soap Stops

Yes world, and all Saab fanatics, I am sorry on behalf of the Dutch for cocking about with your favorite Swedish manufacturer which doesn't produce flat-pack furniture. Allow me to give a brief overview of what went wrong and who is to blame for it.

I'm desperately trying to avoid turning this post into a Victor Muller rant, yet it is largely due to him and his overoptimism that he is now left with nothing. It all started so well in 1999, he acquired the rights to the Spyker name and presented a beautiful retro sports car with proper engineering under the bonnet. This went reasonable for the first five years, also issuing a spider version which also raced (not quite successfully) at Le Mans. Problem number one is that this car has been produced till 2007, and by the time the production discontinued, Spyker didn't have the money to build any new model.

So far, so....reasonable you might think. Well, no. Around 2004/2005 Victor Muller went a bit mental, he started suffering from megalomania. All of a sudden the small car company, building a very small number of cars and only producing one model had to acquire world fame and should be as well known as Ferrari, Porsche etc. So what they did was buying an unsuccessful, overpriced F1 team, and acquire expensive Ferrari engines that didn't fit properly in the designed chassis. Don't ask me where the money came from (never ask that in the case of Spyker), but the point is that it costed more money that they could ever afford and were pretty rubbish for the whole 1 season they ran their team. Luckily they found Vijay Mallya to buy the team (be it for far less than what they bought it for) and were able to continue building a few cars and showing off concepts that would never be produced.

After another few unsuccessful years without any profit, Spyker found out that Saab was for sale. After Koenigsegg did not get permission from GM to buy over Saab (what a dream team that would have been), Spyker bargained like only the Dutch can and got the go from Detroit. With more non-existent money and obscure shareholders the minute Spyker acquired Saab for about 400 million dollars. More than double what the F1 team costed and that for a car company which has not earned a profit since the 1980s, good one Vic.

Saab never got running properly under Dutch command, Spyker was left with a huge debt after the acquiring of Saab, and daily business consisted of pleading for more loans from the Swedish government and the European Investment Bank. As Saab did not turn profitable within a year, Muller started taking his company apart, he sold Spyker to Vladimir Antonov for just 15 Million Euros. He planned to sell the factory in Trollhattan and hire it from the possible buyer, just to get money for a moment. Everyone saw that this car company was in trouble and it came as no surprise that production has ceased in april of this year. Luckily  the Chinese came along and fancied a go at a Swedish car company. More on that in a following post.