Saab 9-3 Sport Combi
I’ve got a friend who drives a late 90s Jetta. A white one. And she loves it. Her reasoning is that it’s exactly because it’s so plain, so unpretentious and standard that its innate charm lies in it’s not trying to be anything, just a car. Like Middlesborough FC is just trying to be a football club. It’s mid-table, uninspired and drab, yet thousands of people seem to like them given the evidence on our roads on and on rainy, cold terraces on the banks of the Weir River in the North-East of England.
By Gavin Williams
The exact same friend and I have been laughing at the most mundane things recently, finding humour in the most commonplace of conversations and observations that people make day in day out without thinking about them. She recounted this story the other day of a guy who explained to her how he’d been playing a lot of tennis in Limpopo recently and because of the sand up there or something the tennis courts have a tendency to “chow a lot of your shoes”. He’d been through a few pairs apparently and even went into detail as to which brands had fallen foul of the rough surfaces he’d been knocking balls about on: No cool brands mind, just Powers, Asics and Hi-Tecs.
His friend –without missing a beat over a mouthful of breakfast- then volunteered the stunning conversation closing observation of “so…a lot of shoes then”. We laughed for about a half an hour. It’s this finding of surreality in the mind-numbing detail and the stories people feel compelled to tell you that’s got me pretty fascinated at the moment. It’s a Seinfeldian wonderland once you start looking beneath the surface. Another example: We met a journalist recently who wrote this article for the Grahamstown Weekly in a section entitled “Our Community”: “GOING BACK…A reader says that many years ago there was a hair salon before the Fruit Basket [was there] at one corner of the Beaufort/Bathurst Street intersection. Wonder what the salon’s name was? Talking hair, do you remember the men’s barbershop upstairs at Birch’s where Pat Matthews was the hairdresser?
That’s it.
That’s the whole thing. Beautiful. It’s so unpretentious and unself-aware that it verges on comic genius in my opinion. I’m delighting in the banal and the unexpected randomness of our modern psyche and that’s probably why I really like the Saab 9-3 Sport Combi I’ve been driving recently. I’d just dropped off a Chevy Aveo so I was going to be easily impressed anyway, but as I made myself familiar with the car a very mundane point struck me. The electric side mirrors didn’t make a sound when I adjusted them. “That’s quite nice” I thought as I slipped into the sort of afternoony realm usually reserved for folded cardigans, waiting for the kids to call and day-time gardening shows.
And you know what; I liked it. Pulling off, the Saab just oozes along sedately. In a car that has a very “sporty” turbo usage indicator above the speedo you’d expect something exciting to happen. But no, not in the maple-lined streets of Saabville. The needle just meanders between the left and then stops just before the red line over to the right. I loved that. It never goes past the red, although there’s a chunk of red-marked space for it to move into. It just stops there. Like someone’s sense of adventure at the end of a cliff. And this is a company that made the word Turbo popular in the late 70s in the same way ABBA made pop popular. There were probably only three cars around then that dared used the word: Saab, Porsche with the 911 and Renault with the 5 Turbo and both of those had no back seats and a serial killer’s temperament.
You’d expect Saab would’ve decided to kick on from that, but all Saabs ended up in the hands of alcoholic Darwinist professors and dentists and became calm and sedate. No big gestures or bonkers over-the-top mentalism. The quiet guy. The what-was-the-point-of-that-story guy. You see, dentists have to be the masters of small talk, of the filler-speech regarding the weather and up to date killing time, tea-based conversation. And so does the Saab. It needs to be topical and precise but not have too many unnecessary sidetracks, exaggerations or anecdotes.
It’s job is to soothe and while away time on the road to somewhere you go to while away the time. I’m not surprised dentists and men of their ilk favour them (especially in station wagon form). After a hard day of hearing a drill and being loathed you want a car that leaves you alone to listen to the dulcet tones of talk radio to keep you topical for the next days chin-wagging. Now it sounds like I’m slating the car, but as I alluded to earlier I really like it. It is what it is. A car. A good, smooth, quiet, safe, practical car. With a turbo boost gauge that doesn’t serve any purpose, 0-100 in a very rounded 10 seconds and 129kW.
It’s well appointed and spacious and everything is dead simple to use.
Saab is a brand I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on. Is it cool in the way my friend’s Jetta seems to be. Or is it the antithesis of everything a car should be? No, it’s not. It offers something that the Germans can’t: A slightly quirky form of reliability and self-assuredness. You’re not trying to impress anyone overtly but have a certain smugness at not being part of the herd. It’s the sitcom that doesn’t need a laugh track to make it funny. You have to look and listen a little closer to get the joke, and I think that’s as cool as it gets.
If you’re someone who likes Labradors, Sunday roasts that co-incide with the Test Match lunch break, collecting antique coasters and investing wisely, but sees yourself as a bit out of the ordinary (and let’s face it, you are in this age of fast-paced rubbish) then this is the car for you. And it’ll be unbelievably cool when you give it to your kid when he goes to Varsity. A couple of ironic stickers on the back and a nickname like Hector and it’ll be the road-trip/hotbox vehicle of choice for the next 5years.
Look around and find beauty in the not quite so ordinariness of everything, rent some Seinfeld and Arrested Development and enjoy your Saab, you smug bastard. You’ve got a car made just for you.
Tags: 9-3, arrested development, saab, seinfeld, small talk, sport combi
