Spruce Goose

“Go out and drive a Saab 900,” said Midge. “I’m going to stay here and have a brew.” Well, he didn’t have to tell me twice. My dad had a 900 Turbo when I was a kid (VLX 993X – I suspect it went to the great scrap yard in the sky long ago) which taught the 7 year-old me all I needed to know about boost gauges and hooligan thrust. Time to make a long-held dream come true with perhaps the ultimate Euro box…

- Daniel Bevis

It’s very telling that various studies have shown Saab to be the marque of choice for architects. Even though the brand is now defunct, these hefty Swedish legends are still very much the go-to retro for people with supremely ordered minds, a keen eye for design and tactility, and a strong feeling that things should just work instead of playing up and causing problems all the time.

It’s for this reason that it’s hard to get into any Saab without experiencing a certain frisson of… is smugness too strong a word? Perhaps satisfaction is a more appropriate term – never self-satisfaction, but merely the certain knowledge that you’ve made the right choice.

The car we have today is a nat-asp 16-valver rather than a full-fat turbo, but this is no bad thing – rather than acting the hooligan and wantonly spinning the needle on that oh-so-prominent boost gauge, we get to revel in the 900’s trump card: tactility. For these are cars engineered to strike a fine balance between keen handling and a supple ride, something that they deliver in spades. Much to the evident delight of the architects.

This car is a ‘GOOSE’ (that is, a 900 SE – look at the badges on the boot, you’ll see why people call it that), a spec level offered in limited numbers in the early 1990s, offering such heady delights as wood trim and all sorts of electric gizmos.