Trollhattansaab.net’s Swade has posted an open letter to Steve Shannon, Saab’s new boss. To his suggestions, excellent as always, I’d like to add my own.

My feeling is that Saab has lost its way and forgotten much of what made its cars attractive when they were last hot, back in the 1980s. It hasn’t helped that GM bought Saab thinking it was buying a Swedish BMW. Premium European manufacturers are not interchangeable.

I remember the Saab 900 Turbo of the mid-8os well. Numerous idiosyncratic approaches to vehicle design made that car intensely interesting. The windshield was upright and curved, perhaps because of Saab’s aeronautic heritage but also because this placed the A-pillars in much less obtrusive locations. The body welds were not finished, because unfinished welds are stronger. The seats were high off the floor and upright, because this was best for visibility and packaging efficiency. The engine was mounted longitudinally facing the rear of the car, and the hood opened forward, because this provided mechanics with excellent access. The hatch opened into a voluminous cargo area. The key between the seats, possibly the first thing the general public thinks of when they hear “Saab,” permitted the shifter to be locked in place.

No doubt I’ve forgotten many details. After all, it has been over twenty years since a Saab salesperson demonstrated these and other quirks that made a Saab a Saab. But what I certainly haven’t forgotten is how special that Saab 900 turbo seemed as a result. This was clearly a car that had been developed through open-minded problem solving by a creative group of engineers. They weren’t focusing on what everyone else was doing. They were doing their own thing, with an appropriate focus on functionality and performance.

These days, BMW is the company that comes closest to taking a similarly idiosyncratic approach to vehicle design. But since their focus has wandered beyond functionality and performance to style and technology for their own sakes, we’ve gotten the Bangle butt and iDrive along with more useful innovations like the throttle-free Valvetronic engine control system.

So, the solution isn’t to make Saabs more like BMWs, but to make Saab’s high-level product strategy more like BMW’s, and thus more like Saab’s strategy back when they either didn’t notice that other companies did things differently, or did notice but didn’t care.