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"  (Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) At one point on December 21, three days after GM announced it was planning to wind down the brand, &amp;quot;Saab&amp;quot; was in the top six Internet searches in Yahoo! If the Swedish car brand could have achieved that kind of curiosity in life, rather than it coming after the seeming death sentence handed out to the company by General Motors this week, we might not be looking at the business equivalent of a toe-tag hanging on Saab&amp;#039;s front bumper.  Before Saab is pronounced dead, though, Dutch boutique automaker Spyker is still working on an 11th hour last ditch offer to GM, and the Swedish government was in talks to see if the company and the jobs that go with it can be saved. The two options for the government, anxious to preserve the 8,000 associated with Saab and its suppliers in Sweden, would be to subsidize an acquisition by Spyker or some other buyer, or resolve to make the automaker state-owned.  Spyker, according to industry sources, is distancing its bid from Russian banking tycoon Vladimir Antonov, who holds a stake of almost 30 percent in Spyker. GM is not keen to have its intellectual properties wind up in the hands of Antonov or Russian entities. Russian state-controlled Sberbank and Canada&amp;#039;s Magna tried to buy a stake in GM&amp;#039;s Opel unit until GM decided to keep it last month. Sberbank&amp;#039;s involvement was part of the consideration in GM backing out of the deal. Spyker, according to Swedish news reports, has a new source of funding for its bid.  On December 18, GM announced that it was initiating a plan to wind down the brand after negotiations with Spyker seemed to collapse. GM, which has been paring its unprofitable brands and businesses following its Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this year, has been trying to sell Saab for many months.  But when it comes to car companies, this is a buyer&amp;#039;s, not a seller&amp;#039;s, market. GM has already begun phasing out Pontiac and Saturn. It is also selling off Hummer. Ford is in the throws of selling off Volvo to Chinese automaker Geely. Porsche sold itself to Volkswagen under financial duress. And Suzuki sold a big stake to VW to bolster its liquidity and boost its operational scale through joint ventures with the German automaker. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s neither a great time to sell or buy car companies as the prices of these deals attest,&amp;quot; says auto consultant James Hall of 2953 Analytics, Birmingham, MI.  Car companies that come with manufacturing plants and union workforces are not that popular with potential acquirers. Even before the global economy and auto sales nosedived at the end of 2008 there was significant excess manufacturing capacity in the world, especially in Europe and North America.  On top of that problem, Saab has the added burden of enjoying very little traction outside of Scandanavia. Worldwide sales at Saab were just 90,000 in 2008, falling from 125,000 the year before, with 22,000 sold in the U.S. Saab sold 7,812 in the U.S. through November. There has been almost no marketing support for Saab at least in the U.S. this year, following GM&amp;#039;s decision to sell the brand.  One ray of hope for the brand occurred on December 14 when Chinese automaker Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Corp (BAIC) acquired the intellectual property rights and equipment to make Saab&amp;#039;s 9-5 and 9-3 sedans for a reported 1.4 billion crowns ($197 million). That deal would not sell the Saab brand in China, but rather allow BAIC to essentially build those cars in China and market them under other brands. BAIC was attracted to the ready-made development of the vehicles, as well as Saab&amp;#039;s safety-orineted technology. If Saab is liquidated, BAIC would be a natural customer for plant tooling and the like, and in theory the company could also negotiate to buy rights to the Saab brand in a deal similar to the one BMW struck to acquire the Rolls Royce brand and then build its own cars to sell under the name.  GM executives have said privately in the last few years that Saab&amp;#039;s car business has never been profitable globally (other than eeking out a small profit in 1994) since GM bought a 50 percent stake in the company in 1989, to be followed by a total purchase of the company in 2000. Even before that, GM executives have said in the past, the car business was never profitable when it was part of Saab-Scania.  GM bought its initial stake in Saab as a reaction to Ford&amp;#039;s purchase of Jaguar. Indeed, GM had been a bidder for Jaguar and was beat out by its cross-town rival. In those days, automakers were on a buying binge amidst warnings from consultants like McKinsey &amp;amp;amp; Co. that companies that did not get bigger would risk being acquired via hostile takeover. Furthermore, GM was skittish about competing in the premium segments globally with the then-flagging Cadillac brand. Toyota and Nissan had just launched Lexus and Infiniti, and GM thought it best to acquire some European premium cachet brands.  GM was long bedeviled by a fairly intractable Swedish management, which made it difficult to execute joint venture engineering projects, as well as the high manufacturing costs in Sweden. Any shared engineering with GM, the feeling was in Sweden, came at the cost of Swedish jobs to create the vehicles from scratch. As half-owner, GM launched a new 900 in 1994 that was based on the Opel Vectra platform to mixed reviews. Swedes, especially, didn&amp;#039;t feel it was a &amp;quot;real Saab.&amp;quot; After taking full control of Saab in 2000, GM created a nicely competitive 9-3 model built on the same engineering architecture as the Chevy Malibu and Saturn Aura. And then it gave Saab two short-lived badged engineered vehicles--the 9-2 (mechanically identical to the Subaru Impreza WRX and coming from GM&amp;#039;s 20 percent ownership of Subaru parent Fuji Heavy Industries) and the 9-7, (an SUV mechanically identical to the Chevy Trailblazer and built in Ohio.)  Before GM decided to rid Saab from its brand portflio, it had planned to build a European Touring wagon similar to the Cadillac SRX, but that plan was scuttled.  &amp;quot;Saab is one of those brands that we are just going to have to consign to the automotive museums,&amp;quot; says Austin, Texas-based branding consultant Felix Washburn who has previously owned two Saabs. &amp;quot;For a brand like Saab to survive it has to have a steady flow of new and upgraded products, vibrant motivated dealers and a marketing budget of at least $100 million to get the sales volume up over 100,000 a year in the U.S., and that just isn&amp;#039;t going to happen in my lifetime.&amp;quot;  And while Saab has been a disaster as a business, it did yield some vehicles over the years that will live on in the hearts of car enthusiasts.  The original 1949 Saab 92 reflected the company&amp;#039;s aviation business and design roots, achieving a drag co-effecient of 0.30, which was the lowest of any production car at the time. The 1955 93 had a three-cylinder two-stroke engine. And those who still like quirky cars in an age of super advanced automobile design and engineering enjoyed Saab&amp;#039;s placement of the ignition in the console rather on the steering column or instrument panel, as well as hoods that opened from the windshield side. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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