AP Spotlight: 1970-74 SAAB Sonett III

Car of the Week is back, and in honor of the recently inked deal between GM, Saab, and Dutch sports car maker Spyker Cars NV, Automotive Playbook's Car of the Week is a sports car from SAAB's past - the 1970-74 Sonett III.

As the name suggests, the Sonett III was the third iteration of SAAB sports car. The Sonett I, or 94, was sold from 1955-57 and equipped with a 748cc two-stroke inline-3 producing all of 58bhp in a car that weighed around 1200lbs, good for a 99mph top speed. The car got its name from the Swedish expression sa natt, meaning "so neat". But only six examples were built before SAAB canceled the project in early 1957.

The Sonett name lay dormant for another 9 years, until the Sonett II, or 97, was produced beginning in 1966. Intended as a racing vehicle, the little Sonett II competed well in contemporary Sports Car Club of America races, with its light weight and spunky two-stroke 841cc "Shrike" Inline-3 engine driving the front wheels. Criticisms by the motoring press - during the burgeoning muscle car era - had mostly to do with the car's lack of grunt, as well as its "homemade styling". After only two years, SAAB corrected the former problem by licensing Ford's German Taunus V4 engine. And, as befits legendary Swedish sensibility, changed the name from Sonett II to Sonett V4. But they made the styling problems worse because they had to redesign the hood with a rather unsightly bulge down the center to accommodate the much larger 1.5L mill.

Seeing that they'd made the already quaint-looking SAAB's styling worse, the company contacted Italian designer Sergio Coggiola, who helped pen a whole new body to ride atop the Sonett chassis. Debuting in 1970, SAAB called the car the Sonett III, and threw in an enlarged 1.7L V4 engine to give the car its highest-ever top speed of 103mph.

2010 NAIAS Report: Chevrolet and GMC

A few days ago, I reported on the showing Buick and Cadillac made at the 2010 North American International Auto Show. Now, it's Chevrolet's and GMC's turns.

This year at the NAIAS, Chevrolet's big announcement had to do with a small car: the Aveo RS concept, to be precise.

It was impressive. Considering the vehicle it's replacing, though, impressive isn't a very high bar to clear. The current Aveo actually began life in 2002 as the Daewoo Kalos. When GM scooped up Daewoo, amidst a massive financial/CEO embezzlement crisis in 2003, the Italdesign Giugiaro-penned Kalos was a decent product. For the 2004 model year, Chevy decided to plug the subcompact hole in its American product line by putting a new front fascia on the Korean-made sedan and 5-door hatch and selling them in America as the Aveo we've all come to know and...well...

Offering the new small car in America also meant that, when it came time to replace the ancient Cavalier, GM could move its replacement, the Cobalt, up in price and therefore make a better profit margin from it.

NAIAS Report: General Motors - Buick and Cadillac

Automotive Playbook was invited by General Motors to be their guest at the 2010 North American International Auto Show this past week in Detroit. It was an incredible opportunity and an exhilarating experience. Although a guest of GM, I had more than enough of a chance to attend the rest of the show and examine what the other major manufacturers, sans Nissan/Infiniti and Porsche, had on offer, as well.

My take on what Ford and Chrysler, the Germans, Koreans, Japanese, and the more minor players showed and announced will be coming soon. GM, however, gets the first set of analysis.

At this year's show, GM was down to displaying 4 "core brands" - Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC - as opposed to the eight they had last year. It was extremely important that GM put its best foot forward, as it had a terrible 2009 involving a bailout, a bankruptcy, and big managerial shakeups. Because of my lack of concision, the Chevy and GMC perspective will be up in about 3 days. For now, here's Buick and Cadillac:

Buick is seen these days as the "wild card" brand. Few in the industry seem to understand why GM kept it, and what it stands for anymore. Fewer still see how the brand can overcome the old person's car image that has been associated with the brand for a couple of decades now.

AP Spotlight: 1965 Buick Riviera

A friend of mine just this evening asked me the following question:

If you could have any non-new car that costs less than $100,000.00, what would it be?

The answer to this question changes weekly. Tonight, as I was searching for photos of the vehicle in question, the thought occurred that my constantly changing automotive infatuations might make for a half-decent midweek feature for Automotive Playbook. So what the heck. I'll try it out.

This week, it's the 1965 Buick Riviera. This is an extremely pretty car, in my opinion. But I'm not alone in it. Sergio Pininfarina, renowned designer of many classic Ferraris, said that this vintage of Riviera "[is] one of the most beautiful American cars ever built; it has marked a very impressive return to simplicity of American car design."

The car debuted with this body for 1963. But by 1965, Buick made some changes. They moved the horizontal quad headlights from the grille to the front fenders. But rather than leave them exposed, Buick stacked them and hid them behind retractable grilles. This emphasized the width of the front, giving it a smoother, meaner look and gobs of road presence.

The dummy twin air scoops that were mounted on the rear fenders just aft of the front door aperature from '63-64 were dropped in favor of a cleaner, smoother look. Chrome rocker panel moldings stretched between the wheel wells, emphasizing the car's visual length, while reducing its visual height. To further emphasize the long, low look of the Riviera, Buick mounted its tail lamps lower in '65, integrating them into the rear bumper.

The '65s were also special because they were the first of Buick's personal luxury coupes to offer the famous Gran Sport option package. Buyers who selected it could get a heavy-duty suspension system, power steering and disc brakes, and a limited slip differential for better wet traction and faster starts off the line.

The centerpiece of the Gran Sport package, though, was the new 425ci (7.0L) V8 engine that breathed through dual 4-barrel carburetors, making 360 gross horsepower and 465 lb-ft of torque. Called the "Super Wildcat 465", the engine gave the 1965 Riviera GS athletic performance to complement its pretty-boy looks.

And though it may have only had 4 seats accessed through two long, heavy doors, the Riviera wasn't impractical inside. Not in the least.

Both front and rear seat passengers were offered more than enough space to stretch out and relax, with enormously comfortable seats and a light, airy, glassy cabin that freed passengers from the claustrophobic feelings that were all too common in contemporary sporty cars. The two rows of plush bucket seats were divided by their own consoles, giving each person, front or rear, the sense that they were being enveloped and cosseted by a truly luxurious car.

The Riv also earned practicality points at the rear, with a trunk that was easily commodious enough for four people's weekend luggage.

All in all, the 1965 Buick Riviera GS offered mighty performance, a satisfying dose of practicality, and good enough looks to cause excessive salivation. It was the car to have for the time. And today, 45 years later, it's not one iota less impressive or desirable. Today, a ridiculously well-restored example will fetch about $30-$40,000. One in good, daily driver condition should run about $10-$15k.

The 1965 Buick Riviera: GS or not, it's an achingly beautiful, competent, historically significant piece of rolling automotive sculpture. It's part of the reason that this writer has such a soft spot in his heart for Buick today.

Buick needs to start making cars like this again. And soon.

Power To the People's Car

Power to the People's Car

Volkswagen is the "people's car" brand in search of more people. A lot more.

In 2008, they won over about 218,000 Americans. For 2018, they're hoping 800,000 of us buy one. That would make for an increase of nearly 400% over the next 10 years. It's 40% above VW's all-time American high water mark of 570,000 Beetles, Buses, Karmann-Ghias, and Squarebacks in 1970. Quite an ambitious goal, I think you'll agree.

VW isn't just thinking big for the American market, though. Their overall goal is to be the biggest auto manufacturer in the world, passing both GM and Toyota for world market domination.

Volkswagen has made grand plans before, though. In the late '90s, VW's Chairman and CEO Ferdinand Piech was on a high-end buying frenzy, scooping up luxury and exotic car manufacturers Bentley, Lamborghini, and Bugatti.

He laid the groundwork for Audi to move from a Tier 2 luxury brand to one that began to go toe-to-toe with BMW and Mercedes-Benz. In the '90s, Audi introduced proper competition to the BMW 7-Series and Mercedes-Benz S-Class with their own all-new aluminum-intensive A8 flagship. Audi took on the new luxury roadsters from BMW and Benz with the avant garde TT coupe and roadster. And the Munich and Stuttgart automakers saw massive attacks on their bread-and-butter compact and midsize sedans from Ingolstadt in the gorgeous A4 and A6. By 2001, Audi was on a roll, with its parent VW having worked hard to get Audi in the same thought as its German rivals.

So, with an ascendant Audi, a recently bought and successful Bentley line, an expanding Lamborghini portfolio, and hyper-car projects in the works for a reborn Bugatti, Piech and his Auto Group had the luxury market covered. But he wasn't satisfied.

The man was set to retire from the company in 2002 and before he left, he wanted to leave his mark on the VW brand by pushing it upmarket, as well. He surmised that, since Volkswagen owned SEAT brand from Spain and the Skoda brand from the Czech Republic, they had the low-price volume market covered, and he could start building more luxurious VWs.

There was one big flaw in his logic, however. In North America, the biggest auto market in the world, the company didn't offer any SEATs and Skodas. What they did offer were cheap, compact New Beetles, Golfs and Jettas and the relatively invisible midsize Passat. And for most Americans, the first car that came to mind when "Volkswagen" was mentioned was still the cheap, rear-engined Beetle of decades past.

That didn't matter to Piech, though. When the Passat came up for redesign in 1998, it was seen as a fantastic automobile, hampered only a little by the fact that it was priced thousands above the competing Accord and Camry. Sales did improve over its rather mundane predecessor, however. When the Golf was restyled in 1999, the quality of its interior improved drastically, and its much higher price reflected it. And when VW's bread-and-butter Jetta came in for its redesign in 2000, optioned-out models were leaving lots with window stickers as high as $26k. But more Jettas were finding garages than ever before.

VW changed its ad campaign to say "Drivers Wanted", and their vastly improved - if more expensive - vehicles did indeed sell better than their predecessors. But before long stories of faulty coil packs, bad transmissions, broken timing chains, dead headlights, self-destructing engines, and fragile interior switchgear became much more broadly known throughout VW's newly upscale model range. Before long, JD Power and Consumer Reports were showing VW at the bottom of their lists for initial quality and reliability.

Just as these reliability issues were coming out, VW began the second phase of its push upmarket. The Passat was facelifted in the middle of 2001 to look like a much more expensive car. In 2002, a new high-tech W8 (not V8) engine debuted under the new Passat's hood, pushing the Accord/Camry competitor up above $40k. It did not sell well. The next year, Piech's pièce de résistance - the $80k super luxury Phaeton sedan - hit the market just as he entered retirement. It didn't sell, either. They also announced that a new VW-badged mid-luxury sedan was in the works. By the time the $60k Touareg SUV was released, heads within the company were rolling, as VW sales and profits were in a freefall.

It's not that the Passat W8, Phaeton, and Touareg were bad vehicles. Quite the contrary, in fact. But there were three reasons they weren't meeting sales expectations:

1) Luxury car buyers - particularly in America - wanted the cachet that the BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, and Audi brands brought. The VW brand was just too pedestrian for them, especially since VW's expensive models had to keep company in the showroom and service bay with $15k Beetles owned by college girls and Golfs, which were bought by guys with theirs hats turned backwards. Wealthy buyers weren't going to wait in line behind these customers to get their luxury car serviced. This logic is what led Honda, Toyota, and Nissan to move upmarket by launching separate Acura, Lexus, and Infiniti brands with separate dealer networks from their downmarket sister brands. VW simply got greedy and overestimated their brand's potential as a status symbol.

2) Volkswagen buyers weren't typically wealthy enough to afford the new, more expensive vehicles that VW was now offering. And the shock they got from reading the new cars' window stickers alienated some of them to the point where they looked at the more affordable and reliable competition.

3) VW worked so hard and put so much money into turning Audi into a legitimate luxury brand. And they were only just beginning to reap the benefits. Volkswagen was now launching vehicles that competed directly with Audi's. So people who wanted an upscale VW could just go to an Audi dealer instead, get the four interlocked rings on their grille, and head home with their heads held high.

The tepid sales of Volkswagen's upmarket cars, teamed with the rank unreliability of their volume models, began to metastasize and company fortunes spiraled. The Passat W8 was quietly dropped after 2004. The Phaeton was canceled after 2005. Plans for VW's midsize luxury sedan were scrapped. And the top-line V10 Touaregs became much rarer on dealer lots as the more reasonably priced V6 models got the emphasis. But the adjustments VW made weren't enough to stop the profuse bleeding. For three years in a row, they lost $1 billion annually in the American market alone. By 2007, rumors of VW pulling out of America altogether began to circulate. Things looked bad.

But before long, VW retrenched and sales began to stabilize. Their fortunes around the world improved to the point where their management could recommit long-term to the American market. So VW drew up plans to escape Euro-to-dollar exchange rate fluctuations by breaking ground on a new plant in Chattanooga, TN. They launched a new "Das Auto" advertising campaign that communicated that their brand was the only way of getting fine German engineering at non-luxury car prices.

They also announced the development of the NMS, or "New Midsize Sedan", to replace the Passat in their lineup. This new campaign was developed under the assumption that the main reason Americans weren't buying as many Passats as they were Camrys or Accords was because the Passat was engineered to European desires for greater feature content and more driver involvement. Camry and Accord buyers looked more for reliability, road isolation, fuel economy, and interior space. So VW set out to engineer a Passat for Americans, which will be bigger, cheaper, less distinctive, and handle less well. And they plan to follow suit with their next-generation Jetta, whose design project they've named "New Compact Sedan". Their hope is that it will compete more directly with the likes of the Corolla and Civic, and sell more like them, too.

Currently, VW sales and profits are growing in Europe and exploding in China and in Brazil. So VW is bullish on their goal of being the best-selling automaker in the world, and growing by a factor of 4 in America, too. They are quite close to achieving the former goal this year, but quite far from achieving the latter. And I am skeptical that they will ever achieve the latter goal.

While VW is one of the few companies that has shown healthy growth through the acquisition of other companies (i.e., Audi, SEAT, Skoda, Bugatti, Bentley, and Lamborghini), they're now in danger of their own brands stepping on each other's toes. Especially since they're planning to re-release the VW Phaeton on the American market. It'll still compete with the Audi A8.

Their dramatic acquisition of Porsche has been a wickedly expensive, dubious, and drawn-out affair this year. And it's coming just as Audi has released the R8, a respectable competitor to the Porsche 911. It's also coming just as Porsche launched their first luxury sedan ever, the Panamera, which competes with the Audi A7 and A8. Audi's Q7 crossover and Porsche's Cayenne SUV also overlap in their pricing structures and share underpinnings. And Audi's plans for a mid-engine sports car to slot in under the R8 are now in doubt because that car will compete directly with the Porsche Boxster and Cayman.

And as far as the American market is concerned, there are reasons to doubt VW's grandiose goals. For one, VW has done very little to address the quality and reliability concerns that are dogging their reputation. They can build as many so-called "American-focused" vehicles they want. If they don't improve reliability and build quality, people new to the brand just won't buy them over the known commodities Toyota or Honda offer. GM and Ford took about 25 years to learn that the hard way, and have only recently released products that compete and win on that front. Besides, as Toyota is now learning, the drive to be the biggest comes with its own set of problems. And with increased production tends to come a decrease in the focus on quality.

For two, VW's dealer body is small and not highly rated by their customers. They'll need many more dealers if they're going to sell as many cars as they're projecting. Adding dealers takes lots of time and money.

For three, they need to send a clear message to the consumer about what their brand stands for. Reintroducing $80k luxury sedans like the Phaeton next to $20k Beetles do just the opposite.

Fourthly, these New Compact and Midsize Sedans can't be mediocre and can't be priced higher than the competition if they're after mass-market appeal. They also have to perpetuate the "cool" and "German" image that their marketing has taken great pains to convey over the years. That'll be an incredibly tall order. If VW sacrifices its quirky, driver's car image, to deliver these more “American-focused cars”, they risk alienating their current, loyal customer base. Especially because VW hasn't really shown that they understand the desires of the bulk of American consumers. One of their newest vehicles, the Routan minivan, debuted with a huge and rather humorous ad campaign featuring Brooke Shields. However, in keeping with VW's desire to serve American tastes, it borrowed a platform and engines from America's best-selling minivans, the Chrysler Town & Country/Dodge Caravan. Yet the Routan sold so poorly in its first full year that VW at one point contemplated withdrawing it from the market.

And finally, in the American market, VW's share will have to triple from their present 2.1% to about 6% in order to meet their 2018 goal of 800,000 units. That means that they'll have to take that share from someone else. All the while, everyone else in the industry is planning new, increasingly competitive products they hope will drive share increases, too. The competition is getting tougher and moving faster by the day.

The people's embrace of VW depends solely on the company's ability to answer the challenges enumerated above. But if Volkswagen wants to become the "people's car" for the most people, they've given themselves a tough hill to climb and a short time to climb it. If they can manage it, though, then more power to 'em.