Saab 900

This is the catalogue record of the Saab 900, one of 71 models GM (General Motors) has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1978. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Saab 900 properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1970s were the decade the oil crises rewired the industry — emissions rules, safety bumpers and fuel economy suddenly mattered as much as horsepower, and Japanese manufacturers went global. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Mazda Mazda RX-7, the Toyota Toyota Supra, the Lancia Lancia Delta — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Saab 900 reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2.0 L Saab B engine / Saab B Straight-four engine / I4 / 2.0 L Saab H engine#B201 / Saab B201 I4 / 2.0 L Saab H engine#B202 & B212 / Saab B202 I4 / 2.1 L Saab H; drive goes through 4/5-speed Manual transmission / manual / 3-speed Borg-Warner Borg-Warner_35_transmission / T-37 Automatic transmission / automatic; the layout is Front-engine, front-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the GM (General Motors) story

Within GM (General Motors)'s own catalogue the Saab 900 sits alongside the 1955 Chevrolet, the 1957 Chevrolet, the 1985–1988 Cadillac Fleetwood, the 1985–1988 Cadillac Fleetwood 75. The record names the Saab 99 as its predecessor and the Saab 9-3 as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Björn Envall. Assembly is recorded at Sweden: / Trollhättan (Trollhättan Assembly) / Arlöv (until 1989) / Malmö (1989–1991) / Finland: Uusikaupunki (Valmet Automotive).

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the Saab 900 was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.