The SAAB 9000 is an under-the-skin sister to my Alfa 164 other Type 4 platforms: Fiat Croma, Lancia Thema Yours above sounds tasty. Mine ate steering racks. Some poorly executed Alfa-specific, high-pressure design. 2 replaced under warranty, with #4 finally lasting a decade. A great high-speed cruiser on many trips to Truckee and Tahoe's north shore. 188(IIRC) HP, 2 cam 3.0L V6, Bosch Motronic injection. 5-speed. It just flew. My 4'10" wife loved and drove it, too.
I want to know what you are following .. it's not domestic, is it? I was going to say it's Alfa Sprint shaped .. but the rear window is too big. Seems simple, so not a Jag? Can you zoom in?
The Saab 9000 was co developed with Lancia going all the way back to at least 1977, and finally the 9000 came out in 1986. I knew about the Alfa Romeo and the fact that an Alfa designer helped with the cosmetic design, I didn't know about the Fiat connection. GM came onto the Saab scene around 1990 (I think) because Saab was mishandling things (in general). I do know that early automatics (900 or 9000) are to be avoided as they just aren't very good transmissions at all but one thing GM did that was good was provide the 9000s with a decent automatic by the mid nineties. Here's a shot of my '97 CS (5-speed -my '98 is an automatic)) with the '98 CSE wheels that I put on it for a trip to AZ:
Very nice. I believe all years of the automatic 164s were to be avoided. The last 164, the pinnacle Q4, had a 6-speed Getrag manual and the later 24v 3.0L engine. Its 4WD system was a Steyr-Daimler-Puch developed viscous coupling w/ a Torsen diff. component that allowed from 0 to 100% proportional drive adjustment to the rear wheels. I hope to see that club member's example one day.
Was the V6 an Opel engine? They did offer the Opel v6 on the Saab 9000s for awhile, I really like the 2.3 l 4 cylinder that most 9000s have -it's the best engine Saab ever made and it's very reliable, my '97 has 185k on it and the timing chain and balance shaft chain and guides were done not too long ago at around 165k and the timing chain was just starting to show signs of wear -we also found a piece of one of the guides in the oil pan! Whoever owned it before me took it to a terrible place to get the head gasket done and they probably did something goofy -believe me I know because they had a 900 of mine for diagnosis one time and couldn't fix it and gave it back with a gushing leak in the valve cover gasket as they trapped the gasket under the cover's lip when they put it back together! On a technical note: if you are looking at old 9000s they have an Achilles heel in the form of a computerized fan operation, these computers can just sometimes not turn the fans on -me and my mechanic found this out one day because of the stamp on the head of the '97 which told that it had the head gasket (or whole head) done and it dawned on us that most old 9000s have or have had a head gasket issue -so we spent an afternoon testing this one out and sure enough the fans were not always turning on. The fix to this problem was to take a thermo switch from an older model and wire it in parallel to the cooling system, the radiators all have the plug for it still, so why not -now the fan comes on when the radiator heat triggers it -simple.
The thermal switch saga takes me to the latest failure on the Spider, the Bosch directional indicator “brain”. I need to look up which three wires bypass it, and allow a generic canister relay. The Bosch replacements used to cost $100 from Alfa. For a directional indicator relay. I’m fairly sure the engines were all silo’d, so no cross fits. Though I think it was right about that time that the main Alfa recycler began taking in Saabs, too.
The Steve Hoffman forum doesn't have a 'dark mode', right? I'm asking because I prefer that for watching photos.
Down in the lower left corner of this page right above the copyright is the Forum Style Changer. Click on it and you will have your choice of a few styles including a dark one (Blackend) ...
Oh, thanks! But sadly, this style makes everything smaller and it places everything in the middle of the screen. Ah, well!
okayyy... you do realise that for someone in a country such as the one i live in, a wild bear visit in their garden has this effect: or is it your pet bear ? hello to the bear
If you haven't tried it, you might give "Blues Deluxe" a shot. Yes it's dark blue, not a black or dark gray, but I'm trying it out and it could be workable. Dark Blue seems to not mess noticibly with photograph location or sizing (though one thing about the Blackened was that it shrunk things so that full photographic frames were more typically seen...while also smashing out some internal detail, sigh)...and Blues Deluxe text seems better than Blackend text. But, we all got different eyes.
