Looking out across the sunshine-bathed Saint Lawrence Seaway on this brilliant summer morning, Saab's North American sales boss, Jay Spenchian, is imagining the possibilities for General Motors' wholly owned Swedish division.
"The customers we have are among the best in the auto industry: young, educated, affluent," he says. "We've got this great owner-base, but we have to expand it. We think it's an awareness issue."
And a product issue. Saab has offered just two model lines for most of the past decade, adding a third, the all-wheel-drive 9-2X, only last year to the existing 9-3 and 9-5 cars. Sadly for Saab, the 9-2X is a thinly disguised Subaru Impreza that has barely registered with any of those exceptional customers Spenchian wants to reach.
That doesn't mean he and his Saab colleagues are giving up. In fact, Saab is now taking another stab at expanding its lineup in an effort to wrangle in more buyers. There are several new Saabs coming in the next few years and the first of them is the all-wheel-drive 9-7X ($50,900-$53,400), a Saab-ified Chevrolet TrailBlazer SUV.
That is, the 9-7X rides on the mechanical bones of a TrailBlazer, though it has its own styling elements inside and out, a lower ride height, better steering and braking and firmer, more responsive handling, thanks to the more aggressive suspension tuning done by real Saab engineers from headquarters in Trollhattan, Sweden.
"This is a conquest car for us," Spenchian says, adding: "Loyalists need to see it as a Saab."
They will if they look only at the front end, where there is a signature Saab three-port grille, and keep focused on the cabin, where there is a lot of Saab stuff, such as a centre console-mounted ignition switch, green backlighting and the grid-patterned vents with the rubbery knobs.
The 9-7X is less Saab-like in side profile and from the rear, where it looks more like a TrailBlazer and its other General Motors siblings, the GMC Envoy and Buick Rainier. What's to like here? The side view of the 9-7X is clean and free of clumsy-looking body side moldings. Also, compared to the other GM midsize SUVs, the wheel arches have been slightly modified and the centre pillar has been blacked out.
In silhouette, the basic shape is easily identified as a member of this GM family and the rear end, with its heavy tailgate (lacking a power lift function available on the Lexus RX330), is identical. Moreover, there really isn't anything at the rear to distinguish this SUV from, say, an Acura MDX, a Volvo XC90 or a Lexus RX330 -- all key competitors.
In this case, not being overly unique doesn't mean the end of the world for Saab. In fact, the 9-7X isn't likely to be a fixture in the Saab lineup for more than a year or two, anyway. It exists primarily to gets Saab buyers accustomed to the very idea of a Saab SUV and to keep many of them from defecting to brands other than Saab.
"Some 40 per cent of existing Saab customers have SUVs in their garages and 30 per cent of our owners have left Saab to buy a four-door SUV," Spenchian says. "Our dealers have told us they need this vehicle. The initial reaction has been great."
Not bad for what in all honesty is a stop-gap measure before the more serious barrage of new Saab models arrives. It starts this fall with the 9-3 Combi, a wagon-like version of the 9-3 sedan. There's also an important refresh coming for the 9-5 in the autumn.
