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GM Is Selling Saab To Spyker Cars
johncadengo writes "General Motors said today that it has struck a preliminary deal to sell Saab to Spyker Cars, a tiny Dutch maker of high-end sports cars, saving the Swedish automaker from what seemed like certain extinction after previous bids for it collapsed. A previous bid from Spyker was rejected by GM in late December because GM was uncomfortable with Spyker's Russian backers. The biggest investor in Spyker is the Russian bank Convers Group, which is controlled by Alexander Antonov. In March, Mr. Antonov was shot seven times and reportedly lost a finger in an attempt on his life in Moscow. No arrests have been made. His son Vladimir, 34, is a top executive at Convers and the chairman of Spyker." GM is taking a bath on the deal, financially speaking.
This isn't nerdy at all... Have Slashdotters turned into bankers?
I used to want a 900 back in the 80s, then GM bought them. I hope Spyker can undo the damage GM has done, and turn the cars into something I would like again.
Sheldon
Correct me if I am wrong: In all of my financial learning, it is not "taking a bath" When you sell a product more for more then simply retiring the brand. In fact, you gain a profit if you now do not have to handle the termination of all the employees....
This is something, instead of nothing. I call it a win.
True, they would of been able to sell it for far more if they had not completely devalued the brand, but they have no right to complain on that fault.....
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
Spyker has 130-odd employees and builds around 40 cars a year.
Saab has 34,000 employees and builds around 100,000 cars a year.
Neither of them make money.
- Who is kidding who with this particularly peculiar "takeover"?
In Soviet Russia, you WILL buy our car! It doesn't cost an arm and a leg ... yet.
... saab arises as new competitor to GM...GM loses. Again.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
From a better source:
"But three crucial issues remained (and still remain): Spyker must deliver the cash, the Swedish government must guarantee a loan, and Spyker Chairman Vladimir Antonov must leave the company."
Many more details:
"The Antonovs were not allowed to start a branch of their Baltic bank Snoras in Britain.The British financial supervisory authority rejected the application, due to the Antonov's nasty reputation for being reluctant to cooperate with the authorities and their general uncommunicativeness.
It is still unclear why the oligark Vladimir Antonov was gunned down and seriously wounded in Moscow in March. But the Antonovs have operations in the harbour in Kaliningrad (former Königsberg), which is notorious for being controlled by the Russian mafia. Kaliningrad is one of the main harbours for shipping guns and drugs to western Europe. In Russia, it is assumed that the attempted assassination is linked to a struggle for power over the operations in Kaliningrad.
No Russian journalists dare to comment on the Antonovs on camera, but off the record they claim that the family has links to shady arms deals.
The Antonovs own a bank in Panama, known as a tax haven. It is not unusual for wealthy Russians to use banks in tax havens for money laundry operations, according to TV4."
Nerds buy geeky cars. Saab is a geeky car. At one point they had sodium inside the valves for cooling. They had standard turbochargers whey you couldn't get turbocharges.
At one point they also had 2-cycle engines (you had to add oil to the gas tank every time you filled it up) and, if you did it right, you could get the engine running backwards, giving you a car with one speed forward and four in reverse. If that ain't geeky, I don't know what is. You could probably win a lot of bar bets with it.
Sodium-cooled valves isn't all that geeky, though. The 292 CID V-8 in my 1964 Ford F-150 pickup had them, as do a lot of other heavy-duty vehicles.
This ain't rocket surgery.
So how does this work in car analogies? Do I have to find a computer analogy instead? ... does not compute.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Superior European thinking will make this work! You heretical bastard! What you say? Did you call me Commie?!
you realize that their stellar financial performance in last few months was a direct result of Cash for Clunkers program which was a blatant handout of taxpayer's money to car manufacturers? We shall see what happens when there is no more stimulus. I suspect that the sales will grind to halt and they will be SOL again
Pretty much the same thing was with Goldman Sachs - they were about to collapse, government came to the rescue with tarp plus lent money practically for free (0,5%), so folks at GS could buy treasury bonds (maybe around 4% - difference is pure risk-free profit at the taxpayer's expense) and gambled in stock market. Thanks to their 'brilliant' strategy they could repay tarp to be free of constraits again... and pay record high bonuses to their managers.
Even 7 year old would make a profit with heavy subsidies from the buddies in government.
This along with some other design features originated with the fact it was designed by people who were in cold places.
It's far easier (in theory, I don't own a SAAB) to get the key into that location and start the car wearing large gloves, than behind the steering wheel..
What makes a '70s car nerdy? I could make a venturi tube (think carburetor) when I was in 3rd grade. Six injectors, a continuous-feedback fuel control system, servo controlled throttle body for drive by wire?
Nah, my MY2000's a lot more fun to screw with. I'm pretty sure I could tear down just about any simple-as-pie 70's muscle car like a tinkertoy in a day and a half. In high school.
Spyker has 130-odd employees and builds around 40 cars a year.
Saab has 34,000 employees and builds around 100,000 cars a year.
Neither of them make money.
- Who is kidding who with this particularly peculiar "takeover"?
Some of those 130 Spyker employees are high-level management. So let's reword it:
Saab is being bought by a Russian bank, who is installing Spyker executives as its management.
w8, takeover from US company results in cars becoming Euro junk?
One that hath name thou can not otter
My 73 Olds Delta 88 would crush your little Saab!
Probably true. Saab pioneered crumple zones and collapsable steering columns.
You'd be dead, and my car would be ruined. I know which side of that equation I'd prefer to be on.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
They didn't even bother to SELL their 3rd most profitable brand, they just terminated it.
In their defense, there really wasn't much to sell of Pontiac other than the arrowhead and some trade dress. Basically all of the technology in modern Pontiacs came from other divisions. And unlike some of the divisions they decided to sell, *if* they found a buyer for Pontiac, all they'd be doing is creating a competitor on their home turf competing in their core market.
Thats really the fault of GM. They were profitable when GM bought them. GM has introduced an insane amount of restrictions and bad design choices that they forced the european brands to use. SAAB employees has been complaining about this for many years.
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
It wasn't a bailout, it was a loan, which they are already paying back. Go back to your fox/cnn/nbc news network and leave the intelligent people alone.
For an intelligent person, your claims are factually incorrect. It was partially a loan, mostly a cash for equity deal in which the government essentially bought General Motors for ~$40B.
The government won't be paid back until new shares are sold to private investors.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Let's see:
* GM is run by beancounters who landed GM where they were last winter
* Spyker can't produce enough cars and needs production facilties; which Saab factories provide in spades
* Saab needs passionate management, not an owner who will just take the best engineering Saab produces for other products, leaving Saab with crap to work with.
Given how badly GM has mismanaged Saab, it is amazing just how good the 9-3 and 9-5's track records are. They are extremely reliable (2003 9-3 teething issues aside; pretty much expected with any new car model), they are the best in their class for crash testing, are very comfortable, can achieve well over 30mpg(combined.. My best full tank to date is 36mpg) when driven conservatively. Handling is really good (the passive rear wheel steering helps!), it has the only stability control system and ABS I don't hate, and braking is incredible.
Saab can turn around. Look at what BMW and Audi have done; both have been at the brink of failure in the not so distant past.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
If European brands are so terrible, why did GM go through hell and high-water to hang on to Opel?
The truth is that a good chunk of GM's engineering is done in Europe; their modern american cars use the same platforms and engines.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Go ahead. Tell me what so special about it. Something more than the superficial key hole in the middle aisle and the like.
Rather than explaining it to you, I'll just point out that you seem qualified for a marketing job at GM.
"Oldsmobile? They're just like Chevys, except with a superficial split grille. (10 years later) Holy crap! What happened to Oldsmobile sales?!?! We gotta shut it down!"
Cars, being the most expensive mass-produced purchase that people make, create a lot of emotional values among their customer base. You can't just boil them down to a rationalized list of superficial features, because customers will figure out you're just going through the motions and move to a brand that appears to have 'faith' in some greater ideals.
GM never understood the appeal of Saab, so they kept them in suspended animation circa mid-1980s, continually recycling the same gimmicks. Compare them to a Volvo or Audi, which have advanced considerably since that era (and the sticker prices prove it).
There's really only one company in the world that would have attempted to pass off a Blazer SUV with a floor-mounted key as a European sport-luxury car. Unfortunately that was the company that bought Saab.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
No, that's not the main reason. And I speak as someone who's owned 96, 99, 900, 9000, 9-3 of several types. In the dim and distant past (say, a 1972 Saab 96V4), Saabs had the ignition switch on the dashboard like every other car did. Very few cars of the vintage cared much about theft, and specifically steering column locks were only just starting to arrive. The 96 has a column gear shift, and by the time they became four-stroke cars they'd also acquired four-speed gear boxes with an H shift pattern, plus a reverse in a third row locked out with a big spring. In passing, the 96V4 also had a selectable free wheel, like a push bike, so the four-stroke version (which has appreciable engine braking) could be driven like the two stroke version (which doesn't). Rather than re-engineer the steering and move the ignition switch onto the column in order to keep up with modern trends for theft prevention, Saab instead just modified the gear shift so that you had to put the car into reverse before you could remove the key, and the lock mechanism engaged on a pawl to hold the gear lever in reverse. So if you hot-wired the car, you'd be driving round in reverse. One early prototype of the 99 also had a column shift and (essentially) 96 driveline, but the car was designed around the Riccardo/Triumph `B' slant-four engine and the gearbox ended up on the front behind the radiator, so a floor shift made a lot more sense. By then `lock it in reverse' was part of Saab tradition, so the ignition switch went down to the floor as well. Saab were also early (on the 99) in worrying about steering columns for crash safety and they were keen to have the column able to collapse smoothly without needing to have the mountings for a column lock in the way. The 90 and 900 are just bigger 99s, so had the same mechanical layout. The 9000 was an attempt to be `more normal' (that's often blamed on the Type 4 collaboration that also gave Lancia Thema, Fiat Croma and Alfa 164, but actually the designs diverged a lot and the power is from a transverse-mounted Saab H Engine, so there was no real reason forced on them) so has a normal steering lock, but for the GM 900 (later early 9-3), 9-5 and current 9-3 the shift went back down the floor. The manuals lock in reverse, the autos in park, but (I'm pretty sure: my wife's just taken the 9-3 for the day, so I can't check) there's also an electro-mechanical steering lock. Not that much of this stuff matters these days, because the real theft protection is the ECU immobiliser driven off the key electronics. Locking in park isn't unusual: my VAG DSG gearbox'd Skoda does that, but locking in reverse is still a Saab `thing'. The best Saab I owned was a 99, which I finally sold with about 180K miles on, as a going concern with an MoT and a healthy life in front of it. I wish I'd kept it. The current one, a 9-3 estate, is overly GM-ish, but still has nice seats that don't hurt my wife's back, which is the main reason we buy Saabs.
If Benny from ABBA had been called Sven, then ABBA would have been called SAAB. Jerry
Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti...
BRAVO Kimvette:
hit the nail on the head!
SAAB had an amazing history of pioneering technologies and unique Sweedish design esthetics (which really is unique, and is more than IKEA).
They got buried in GM (who actually did a decent job rebranding Cadillac in the market), but never knew how to position SAAB in the market.
Wish this was finalized a few years ago prior to the 9-5 redesign (though it looks nice).
Here's praying that as they go forward and aren't required to pull from the GM parts bins we should see some real changes.
Someone in SAAB: PLEASE look back to the 900 prior to 94 and bring back the whale tale long slant hatchback...put that on top of the amazing best-in-class X-drive and you've really got something....like the Mini, not for everyone, but some unique bodies don't need to change for change's sake.