Saab returns: New owners debut 1st cars in planned series

STOCKHOLM - Two-and-a-half years after Saab shut down production because of financial trouble, the Swedish car company rolled a new sedan off its assembly lines in Trollhattan, in southwest Sweden, on Monday.

National Electric Vehicle Sweden, the Hong Kong-based company that bought the brand out of bankruptcy in September 2012, presentedits new 9-3 Aero Sedan as the first in a series of new cars it will produce.

The company said the first 200 cars will be delivered in the spring and will cost about $42,500 each. Next year, it will also launch a 9-3 wagon, followed by convertible and electric models.

Saab shut down production in April 2011 after six decades of building cars as its earlier Dutch owner, Spyker Cars, struggled with financing. It filed for bankruptcy in December the same year, dealing a huge blow to the town of Trollhattan and the company’s 3,000 employees.

National Electric Vehicle Sweden now employs about 600 people, including many former Saab employees, and acting President Mattias Bergman said he felt “incredibly happy, proud and humble” that the company has been able to restart production.

“It is truly a complex mission to start a car production process which has been still for two and a half years,” Bergman said in a statement.

Bergman wouldn’t give any forecast of how many cars the firm expects to sell but said it will start on a small scale and adjust production based on order intake.

The company aims to make electric cars under the Saab brand, but said it willalso provide gasoline-fueled cars until “electric cars fully meet customer demands.” It said it decided to start off with a gasoline-fueled car to get production going as fast as possible and retain previous supply chains and specialist staff.

It said it will start selling its cars directly to Swedish customers through its website beginning next Tuesday.

The luxury sports-carmaker Spyker Cars bought Saab from General Motors - itself in bankruptcy protection after the financial crisis - in 2010. At that time, Saab sales had dwindled to about 27,000 from a peak of about 133,000 cars in 2006.

GM had acquired a 50 percent stake of Saab in 1989 and gained full ownership in 2000.

Saab Automobile’s roots date back to the 1937 establishment of aircraft manufacturer Svenska Aeroplan AB, which began making cars in 1947. The auto business wassplit from the aerospace operations, now called Saab AB, in the 1990s.

Information for this article was contributed by Christoph Rauwald of Bloomberg News.

Business, Pages 25 on 12/03/2013

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