Start with what the Saab 96 is: a 2-door sedan with 795 cc Saab two-stroke, built from 1960 to 1980, in the decade that gave the world the pony car and the mid-engined supercar. What it meant takes a little longer. The shape is credited to Sixten Sason. 547,221 were built.
How it came about
The Saab 96 is an automobile manufactured and marketed by Swedish automaker Saab from 1960 to January 1980, replacing the Saab 93. The 96 featured aerodynamic two-door bodywork, four-passenger seating and at first a two-stroke, three-cylinder engine, later a four-stroke V4.
The hardware
The engine is 795 cc Saab two-stroke; other versions carried different engines, listed in the specification table below. On the scales it comes to 873 -. Drive goes through a 3-speed manual / 4-speed manual / 3-speed Saxomat. The layout matters: the engine drives the front wheels, the packaging choice that gives a small car a big cabin. The wheelbase is 2488 mm. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.
Family and rivals
In the Saab Automobile line-up the Saab 96 has a clear place: it replaced the Saab 93; it handed the line to the Saab 99; the factory was Trollhättan. The cars a buyer would have weighed it against include the Nissan Patrol, the Dodge Challenger, the Mini Mini. Its Saab Automobile stablemates include the Saab 60 and the Saab 600.
Owning one today
There is no federal ownership record for the Saab 96 — it predates the complaint database or was never sold in the United States — so MotorJury publishes no running-cost figure for it. For a car of this age the price is set by the collector market and the condition of the individual example, not by a formula.