I have had a lot of Saabs over the years and feel like I should own one of these to put a capstone on my Saab experience.
They are finally getting VERY cheap.
Does anyone have any actual hands-on experience or close knowledge of these, their strong suits and their problems aside from internet lore? It's just a GM Epsilon car with an Ecotec 2.0T...
I was thinking on starting this thread today.
Pretty, eh?
Is the auto reliable?
Is the electronic whiz-bang stuff reliable?
Can't find it, but someone had a build thread on one of those.
fanfoy wrote: Can't find it, but someone had a build thread on one of those.
I wonder how it all worked out?
Despite being an Epsilon platform 2.0T Saab managed to change damn near everything about the car. I remember seeing the figures and they were staggering (one-off part and higher costs) ruining GM's final attempt at platform sharing to make them profitable. Will post the article if I can find it.
I share this only as an aside. Now that they are rare, orphans, and cheap I really want one.
Got a unicorn for the family - 2010 SAAB 9-5 content
My short, 10 days, experience with one, hopefully we will have the car back in a couple of weeks. From my reading they seem pretty solid mechanically, especially without the All Wheel Drive system though there are Buick cross reference parts for that system.
On the inside there are a few things. The set heaters seem to break requiring you to pull apart the seat to replace the heating element. There is an LED light bar on the trunk that gets dim and is NLA. The tail lights are also NLA in the U.S. at least and getting a pair is very expensive. Another thing in the tail light cluster is odd. There are LED and incandescent lights for turn signals. The incandescent bulbs get hot and loose connection causing a fast turn signal tone in the cabin. The LEDs still flash but the other lamp does not. To fix it you have to buy new bulbs and the holder for it or put in an LED bulb with resistors to fake the car.
The one we bought had @ 118K miles on it when it was taken back and it drove like a new car.
A year or so back I talked with a high line used car dealer in Montana about one he had. His only real pick was that sometimes is really cold weather, say well below zero, the rear diffs on AWD models will sometimes groan. We don't get that kind of weather so I didn't investigate solutions, and we ended up keeping our wagon anyway.
Aero would be my trim preference. The turbo V6 was pretty well sorted by the time it went into these cars - early years around '06 seem to need chain tensioners after 100k miles. That said, its the uplevel trim and seats, larger wheels and sportier suspension of the Aero that draw me. I really like the 2.0 though I suspect it'll have to work kind of hard in a car of this size. It would be cool if it worked well in the application, it sure can put down the power with a tune and light mods.
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