Throughout the years, it’s difficult to understand Saab’s weird decisions such as two-stroke propulsion, back-to-front engines, and repeatedly telling GM’s accountants to shove it, but it’s impossible to not like them. After all, making Volvo look normal is an incredibly difficult task, and Saab certainly persevered through adversity. After years of neglect at the hands of General Motors, Saab finally had its own all-wheel-drive system in 2008, and it would let everyone know with a limited-run performance flagship called the Saab Turbo X. Welcome back to GM Hit Or Miss, where we dig through the crates of General Motors’ pre-bankruptcy product planning to separate the bangers from the flops.
If you aren’t familiar with Saab, this strange Swedish carmarker was founded in 1945 as a subsidiary of an airplane manufacturer. For decades, it was a niche automaker with a penchant for quirky performance and a pathological obsession with safety, but it had a rocky road. From a merger with truck brand Scania, to being owned by General Motors, to being passed along to Spyker, to the sad whimper of NEVS, this source of pride for the Swedish city of Trollhaatan never found sustainable footing, and ground to a halt shortly after the Great Recession.
Nevertheless, it attempted a halo car comeback on the eve of global financial disaster, one that took a page out of Audi’s playbook with an interesting all-wheel-drive system instead of the front-wheel-drive layout found in most prior Saabs, and had a limited run of just 2,000 units. The name of the car? Turbo X.
Spinning All Four
Underneath the Turbo X sat a Haldex all-wheel-drive system, but one unlike any other Haldex system people were used to at the time. See, in applications like the Audi TT, the Haldex setup was regarded as a “slip-and-grip” system, occasionally dragging the rear axle into play once the front tires had started to let go. While this is a technically acceptable form of all-wheel drive for people who don’t crave sporting credentials, anyone used to Nissan’s ATTESA system or even BMW’s xDrive would want more. As configured in the Turbo X, the Haldex system was a whole lot more.
For starters, this first application of Generation IV Haldex could theoretically send 100 percent of the engine’s torque to either the front or rear axle. Of course, something would have to go massively wrong for that to happen, like one axle being off the ground, but even sending more than 50 percent of engine torque to the rear axle in a transverse front-engined car is impressive. However, the Haldex unit isn’t the most impressive component of the XWD system, because Saab had something else up its sleeve.
Available on most XWD models and standard on the Turbo X was an electronically-controlled variable-locking rear differential. Yep, the same sort of tech you’d find in a new BMW M Car or hi-po Corvette. This awesome but fragile (more on that later) differential could send up to 40 percent of torque going to the rear axle to whichever rear wheel had more traction. Any all-wheel-drive system is typically only as good as its differentials, so fitting a proper limited-slip unit to the back of the Turbo X showed serious intent.
Power Play
While Saab was fiddling with all-wheel-drive, it was also figuring out how to extract more juice from its 2.8-liter turbocharged V6. For those familiar with the Saab tuning scene, this isn’t a difficult task, and Saab turned up the wick to 280 horsepower from the lesser Aero model’s 255 horsepower at the time. In addition to the powertrain tweaks, Saab went hard with the visuals on the Turbo X, casting a shadow over everything. Black paint, dark titanium accents, bi-color three-spoke wheels, this thing was trying to be the Swedish Buick GNX.
Rubber, Meet Road
Was the Turbo X any good? Well, yes and no. When Car And Driver tested one in 2008, they seemed largely disappointed.
Our test car barely broke 15 seconds in the quarter-mile and needed a full six seconds to hit 60 mph. We’re not quite sure how fast the Turbo X will go because during our top-speed run, the engine began to overheat around 145 mph. On the road, the Turbo X feels peppy, but you need to use the gearbox because you’ll notice turbo lag if you let the revs drop below 2000.
Cornering grip was also less than record-setting at 0.83 g. But the Turbo X has a taut feel on the road, and if you press it hard it rotates nicely when you ease the throttle near the cornering limit. The downside of this sporty suspension is a pogo-like hop on certain freeways and the occasional harshness over severe bumps.
While Motor Trend had more positive things to say about the Turbo X’s ride and handling, they also noted turbo lag, ultimately summing the car up with the line “I wanted to like the Turbo X better, yet I still enjoyed it.” Evo magazine, on the other hand, reached a similar yet more disappointed verdict.
Yes, I want to like this car. But while I appreciate its technical cleverness and failsafe demeanor, I am not excited by it. Good try, Saab, but your arrow has missed the keen driver’s heart.
See, 2008 was a banner year for sports sedans, with everyone from Infiniti to Cadillac genuinely trying to make moves at BMW’s throne. The Saab Turbo X was quick, but it just didn’t have the panache to keep up with the segment’s most exciting contenders. A BMW 335i or Infiniti G37 performed better, albeit at the expense of available five-door practicality. Oh, and if you couldn’t get your hands on a Turbo X but still wanted a fast Saab, all you had to do was wait. In due time, the XWD system, the electronically controlled limited-slip differential, and even the high-output V6 were downloaded to less special models in the range. Sure, these later XWD models are still rare because the 9-3 was growing quite stale by then, but they’re out there.
A Road To Nowhere
Despite its technology trickling down, the Saab Turbo X is still cool, no matter how good or bad it may be. Black is still a cool color, three-spoke wheels are cool, turbos are cool, the letter X is cool, it all just adds up. Coolness only goes so far though, so was the Saab Turbo X a hit? Nope. It’s an ouroboros of hipsterdom, eating its own tail into relative obscurity forever. Bringing 600 examples to America was likely the right call, because let’s face it, how many people could justify paying E90 BMW 335i money for a weird Swedish sedan that could barely outrun a 328i? The Saab Turbo X was a dead-end near the end of Saab itself, a showy staircase to nowhere in particular.
(Photo credits: Saab)
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> This awesome but fragile (more on that later) differential
Where’s the more? I was hoping to year about the diff’s failure modes. 😥
It’s just typical GM not understanding coolness. Saab was too fun and too different, so that scared GM, and they had to make it dull and kill it in the process.
I have owned a Buch of Saabs over the years, including my current Saabaru 9-2x. But my 2008 Aero was just a beast. I only had the FWD with the manual stick, but I think I remember it testing faster than the AWD version off-the-shelf. It certainly pulled like a train. That V6 just had so much grunt, it was addictive.
My 9-2x is for sure my last Saab though, specific Saab parts, even on the badge engineered cars like my Impreza clone, are becoming hard to get. All of the body parts a-pillar forward on my car are Saab specific, and the fenders, hoods, bumpers are all NLA. I can’t even get a driver’s side headlight new, so I’ve had to do some plastic welding on mine.
Still dailying my (og) 9-3 Viggen.. my fifth and probably final Saab. No issues with finding a dealer.. Been fixing it myself since the aftermarket warranty expired in 2007. Would have loved a turbo X, but inline fours seem so much easier to work on. It’s a pretty simple car now, but only because cars became so much more complicated since the year 2000. I would love to get a ride in an ng9-3, especially an aero or turbo X sometime if anyone has one near RI.
The OG Viggen is on my list of someday cars. My wife wants a 9000 Aero, and I’d also love a 900 SPG, though it’s hard to justify when we already have an M3 for fun.
M3 for fun is a fine choice! 9k Aero and SPG would be in my collection if that were ever a thing. My other cars were all various og900’s including a 16v turbo 3door.. loved those hatchbacks. wish I had that turbo 16 back. have a good one!
I like to shit on GM, but their early work with Saab on turbo engines was pioneering for where we are now with ICE.
That relationship was pretty parasitic — most of the work was saab engineering that GM then took elsewhere. I strongly suspect reverse engineering by other brands also was heavily influenced by saab (Ford ecoboost, for instance), but that’s just speculation.
Par for the course. Call it parasitic if you want, but that’s precisely why you invest in smaller but high tech companies. To integrate their tech into your larger organization because their tech is good. The reality is GM funded a turbo pioneer and kept them for a while and ushered us into the turbo age.
This car is like every performance sedan is now. Turbo 6 pot that Saab launched in like 1997.
And GM had turbo 6 pots in the 80s with the Grand National.
Enjoyed a 1997 900SE (goose)turbo convertible for 60k mi. After the original owner put 125k mi. The B204L engine is incredibly overly robust, and has been over boosted successfully to 666 hp. on stock internals by some madman utilizing magasquirt ecu. (two K05 turbos I think).GM purchased 50% of SAAB in 1990, and tried to get the engineers to cut costs, they verbally agreed, but kept B204L unchanged. In 2000 GM purchased the last 50% and enforced cost cutting resulting in the change to the B205 having significantly frailer internals.
Of course GM did what they always do. That’s why I don’t like GM. 🙂
Thanks for the info.
It still looks great, though. It looks modern aside from the clear taillights.
I’ve seen a few of these for sale over the years when looking at cars, and boy are they hard to resist. But I was absolutely terrified of an AWD system from an orphan brand that was used on so few cars.
Finding a Sportcombi is damn hard, but it’s basically the perfect car if you like a nice combination of performance and quirk in your life. Good luck finding a manual one though.
I had a 2007 Sportcombi that I bought when it was a few years old. Loved it… and it had a manual which was a hoot. The problem is that after a while things started to cost me money. Lots of little to medium size problems that would cost $500-1000 to fix. The final straw was when the heater core and dash controllers for the HVAC started to go which would have required dash removal and who knows what percentage of the value of it to repair. I do miss SAAB though…
I had a ’96 Saab 900 that even before the death of the brand was pretty expensive to service. But I get the orphan brand struggle, I felt the need to move on from my Suzuki SX4 once I realized that:
A) Nobody really wanted to work on it outside of a former Suzuki dealer that was 45 miles away. Especially anything that required actual diagnostics (the only real issue ended up being a wiring harness for the airbag system, but that was sort of tough to figure out, and nobody around here was able to make sense of it).
B) That former Suzuki dealer that was 45 miles away knew what they had, and charged me for work like the now Kia dealer that it was… Ugh.
I had a ’96 900 turbo that was probably the most reliable vehicle I’ve ever owned. It wasn’t any harder to work on than any other car I owned. Only real problem with it was the DIC’s were known to blow at any minute, which generally required carrying a spare in the trunk.
Fantastic car, and no one ever bitched about servicing it the few times I actually took it somewhere and didn’t do it myself.
To be fair, mine was… not well maintained when I got it in 2007. We’re talking a $3500 car that I purchased to learn to drive stick. So my experience was probably not a super fair representation of the experience someone would have with a better example.
I got mine around ’06 and it was a salvage title because a previous owner somewhere down the line rear-ended someone. The one perk with that is they threw on a 9-3 front bumper which looked so much better than the 900.
But it was a $2,700 car in ’06. Fantastic car. Though, the whole dashboard rattled like crazy (I think because the airbags had gone off).
The simpler you can get the NG 9-3, the better they are. I’d put the peak at 2.0T manual sport-combi with minimal options – the smaller engine is much easier to service and the whole drivetrain is lighter, making for a better drive IMO. I owned a 2006 2.0T manual sedan and a 2009 2.0T manual sport-combi, and both were great cars. The sedan was going strong over 200k miles in my ownership, including track days, autocross, rallycross etc. I finally sold it at 220k miles to get the sport-combi, which was also problem-free when I had it.
2007 and later got a new interior and while I miss the center-dash info screen, the Saab-unique fiber-optic network was replaced with a more GM-standard and better-supported conventional network. Saab-specific modules like the key & ignition, ECU etc are getting harder to find and program to the car at this point, since the Saab-specific Tech 2 is not something that most GM dealers still buy into and support, so you need to find a more specialized independent mechanic to make ownership now a bit easier.
Oh, if I had an independent that I could trust to help me keep a Saab on the road , I would totally own one. I’m always keeping my eyes and ears open for one.
And you’re right, going simpler with a 2.0T SportCombi is very much the way to go.
“This awesome but fragile (more on that later) differential could send up to 40 percent of torque going to the rear axle to whichever rear wheel had more traction.”
So 60% of the torque is going though the spinning wheel? How? Torque is force x radius and as the radius is the same it has to be that the tractive force at the contact patch is higher, which it can’t be on the wheel that has less traction.
I need to see a force diagram. Maybe it’ll be in the bit about fragility, I’ll keep looking…
This is engine torque, not “effective applied torque” (for lack of a better descriptor) to the ground.
I love mine. Sure, it’s not really that fast, especially by today’s standards. But it does drive very nice for my needs. I also don’t understand why the reviews talk about turbo lag, their is barely any. Acceleration is quite linear and smooth
“This awesome but fragile (more on that later) differential…”
I think something got missed in the editing of this article as there is no follow up on the fragility of said differential.
Also, no images of the sportcombi version?!?!
Of the 600 units brought here, I believe the Sportcombi was less than half of them and something like 33% had the manual. Love those wheels though
Bad news:
I read this article twice thinking I missed the fragile follow-up, and then ctrl-f’d it and your comment is match 2 & 3.
Good news/wishful thinking:
Maybe there’s an entire article dedicated to the fragility of the ahead-of-it’s time Saab electronically locking rear differential coming up soon?
“…Saab’s weird decisions such as the abandonment of two-stroke propulsion…”
There. Fixed.
People act like 2 stroke is bad compared to 4 stroke. It is literally twice as many power strokes. Sure, it uses some oil, and takes more maintenance, and emissions are a nightmare BUT, I forgot where I was going there.
“…BUT they are objectively awesome and delightful” is, I assume, what you had intended there.
Sounds good to me!
Thanks for understanding and explaining that variable torque split is a function of available traction at each axle. Most people don’t understand this.
@thomas we can’t talk a out the X without bringing up it’s square exhaust tips! Square!
These things were so cool at the time and really peak 9-3ng. AWD, manual, tri-spokes, square tips, and dem Saab seats doe! I can’t believe GM didn’t at least use the seats in anything else, the leather is about the only automotive hide that doesn’t feel like it’s enshrined in plastic and the bolsters were just perfect.
True but weird fact: the last model Saab 9-3 and the Chevy Malibu had the same platform – the Epsilon 2 Short Wheelbase. Yet the Saab 9-3 had a better crash characteristics than the Chevy Malibu. It was the result of a moose test in which the A-pillars had to be strengthened to withstand a collision with a moose’s torso. I remembered a GM manufacturing engineer complaining that Saab wouldn’t remove 2 meters of MIG welding instead of going almost completely spot-welding like the Chevy (there are two short MIG welds, about 50cm on each of the Malibu’s front upper beams to improve front crumple). I like think that difference made Saab a stronger car.
“If you aren’t familiar with Saab…”
Dang that made me feel old.
Yep. Reading that kinda hurt my feelings, like there could be people who don’t want to know about Saab?
With apologies to both of you, I was born in 1995, and if it wasn’t for car enthusiast websites like this, I don’t know if I’d have ever heard of Saab.
Don’t know if I’ve ever seen one in person.
(Pennsylvania resident)
You’re 28 and have never seen or heard of Saab? Are there underground caverns in PA you grew up in?
I mean, I definitely didn’t start reading/getting into car stuff til the last 5 years or so…and I grew up in the coal region…I hope that makes it slightly less unacceptable.
Lol it’s fine, I was just surprised.
Those “underground caverns” you refer to are coal mines.
Ha.
Well, I guess the letter “X” was cool, but y’know, shit happens.
That was my exact reaction…it was cool but it’s been, uh, appropriated.
Apparently you can bolt on GTX3071, do some other stuff, add corn juice and push about 500 wheel on these things. Feel down a deep Swedish rabbit hole of rural Swedes who enjoy Saab more than GM ever did. Big fans of camo cargo pants as well. Not particularly relevant, but very interesting people.
Sounds like you’ve been to Biltema.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biltema
Go for the fika, stay for the rednecks.
So, effectively… Svenska Däck?
Maybe?
Last time I was in a Biltema I bought my favorite pair of construction work pants (not camo though), enjoyed a dirt cheap fika (coffee and a roll) for the equivalent of $0.50 (!) and sat in the food court as I ate while a pair of moms at a nearby table socialized as a toddler joyfully ran around without any pants on at all. It was surreal.
It sure is handsome.
A word I rarely use outside of complimenting my nephews in their church clothes or talking about George Clooney, but one that always seems just right for older Saabs.
Speaking of rarely used words…
Ouroboros sure seems to come up a lot in Autopian articles. (Just me?)
“Everyone dig in! This ouroboros isn’t going to eat itself, you know.”
“Ouroboros” is having a bit of a moment. I think it’s a reflection of the Zeitgeist.
It just keeps coming up, over and over again. In an oddly cyclical way.
Maybe not a strong performer out of the box, but you could also look at the TurboX Sportcombi as GM selling a turbo V6 wagon with a stick, AWD, an eLSD, and rear wheel steering. 9-3s seem to have found a well-loved niche as solid tuner cars now.
*Thar* combo of TurboX, Combi and stick was even more Grail-like, with about 50 cars with this combo making it to the ‘States.
Back in 2008, someone in the office building I worked at had one of these, and I would often walk by it in the parking garage. It was honestly a sharp looking vehicle and I think it has aged well.
In all fairness, telling GM’s accountants to shove it is not a weird decision and usually a smart one.
The Turbo X Sportcombi wagon is really cool.
They should’ve rebadged it as a Cadillac BLS-V, and they should’ve sold the BLS over here.
I haven’t driven the turbo X or AWD models, but I’m surprised about the turbo lag with the V6 of the aero… The ones I’ve driven were the lower power ones but all pulled smoothly from 800 rpm with no real lag. However, the V6 cars were heavy and definitely felt it, so I’m sure the AWD system didn’t help. If I remember correctly, the turbo X was over 4000 lbs, while the turbo i4 fwd sedan was about 3200 and wagon was 3300. The smaller engine was almost as quick and the whole car felt much lighter and more agile. The 2.0T did have a bit of boost lag, but over 2000 rpm it still pulls hard and is a much easier engine to work on. That’s why it was my pick (twice, in sedan and wagon variants, both with manual trans) of the range.
Even the FWD Aeros felt nose heavy while driving, even heavier than a 9-5.
Yea, definitely. I only drove FWD versions but it was very noticeable despite the acceleration
This car is a perfect example of just how far weve come:
Im pretty sure ALL of these performance numbers are now eclipsed by a base model stickshift Jeep wrangler. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Saabs rule. I blame any faults of the Turbo X on a toxic infection called GM. Besides, I think the Grail version is the manual wagon.
There is still a glimmer. From today’s WardsAuto;
Canadian Start-up EV Electra Obtains Rights to Emily GT
https://www.wardsauto.com/vehicles