Faults:

Very little has gone wrong with the car. The Saab label fell off the hood at 10,000 miles, and was replaced for free under warranty. Nothing else has failed or gone wrong with the car.

General Comments:

The car is able to get very good gas mileage as the turbo does a lot of work letting the engine loaf along. I average between 21 and 25 mpg in the city, and 31 and 36 on the highway. The EPA gives it 19 and 29 so I always do better than that.

The car handles very well. It is not as tight at a BMW which has rear wheel drive, but if you drive the Saab hard the BMW will outperform it only if it is driven hard as well. Most of the time owners do not know how to drive so the Saab can keep up with the 3 series BMW.

Acceleration is good as the turbo lag has been minimized using Saab's engine controls, a Mitsubishi turbocharger, and a GM 2.0 Ecotec engine. This is a strength of the car with the Bosch sourced five speed automatic transmission.

The cabin is comfortable for spirited driving as well as highway cruising. Although the platform is shared with other GM cars, it is more tightly tuned for handling so potholes are felt particularly hard in this car.

I can see myself buying another car in a few years if the brand survives as up to now, it has been the best car I have owned (this includes a Toyota with a blown engine due to sludge at 65,000 miles and the Acura with a blown transmission at 69,000 miles).

Faults:

Before 1,000 miles, there were two incidents of engine almost stalling for 1 or 2 seconds while waiting at traffic lights. Nothing happened, and it never happened again. Possibly due to the run-in period.

At ~1,500 miles, one headlight seemed to have malfunctioned for a split second, and SID (Saab Information Display) informed me about it. Never happened again.

The alarm sporadically sounds off when I unlock only the trunk (and nothing else) and open the trunk lid. I have to unlock door(s) in order to turn it off. Later the SID would show me about that, which I already knew. I brought my car into the dealer twice (when I had oil changes at 10,000 and 20,000 miles services) to try to get this fixed, but the dealer failed to help and fix this problem.

The automatic door locks do not behave the way I preferred, and I requested help from dealer during my oil change appointments, but the issue still exists. I am not sure if this is by design (hopefully not), but it seems like the in-car computer (BCU?) is really hard to configure. I want the remote control to unlock driver's side door after pressing once on the unlock key and all doors after pressing the unlock key twice. (This used to work fine.) I also want to have all doors locked after I start driving the car, and when the car reaches a certain speed, and this has been configured as preferred (although it seems like the locking is triggered by RPM more than speed). In addition, I would like all doors to be unlocked when I turn off the engine and remove the key. This caused me to leave my car with the dealer for three days (one day to diagnose if the BCU (?) is malfunctioning and sending unlock signal to only driver's side of door, and two days to replace the BCU and reconfiguration). Now it works fine, but the unlock door remote control key does not work the way I want. It opens all doors now.

As mentioned by the survey "Multi-cultural Swedish performance", there is a very minor rattle noise at driver's side happening once in a while. I think it might be caused by the airbag (inflatable curtain).

General Comments:

I fell in love with Saab since 1995 when I first drove a 1988 Saab 900 Turbo in winter time. Driving on snow with it is like driving on regular pavement. I test drove a 2003 or 2004 Saab 93 convertible and loved the powertrain, so I started paying attention to it until I finally can afford it in 2006.

After I finally had it in 2006, I was having some difficult time getting used to it at first. The sudden power supply when passing in heavy traffic almost gave me an accident because I didn't realize it is so fast without realizing the turbo lag on this car is not obvious.

This is a very potent car for commuting. My routes to work involves uphills and downhills, and it handles with absolute ease. No sign of struggle at all.

The braking system is one of the best about this car. It brakes so smoothly, quietly and rapidly that you will tend not to hit the brakes until the last moment. Although the front rotors are much larger than the rear ones, there are much more braking dust in the rear than in the front. I asked about this of the dealer, and they just told me this car is designed this way. Unless the material is used differently for the front and rear brakes, I don't understand how this is done. I would be really interested in knowing the philosophy of this design.

I did not give "comfort" a full score because the suspension is a little bit too tight for speed bumps (that keep people driving slowly) even when driving slowly. The suspension holds road pretty well at turns (although I am no extreme driver) with a confident feel.

Although the rear seats look like having short leg room, they do have ample hip room to compensate rear seat passengers' comfort assuming they sit with proper posture.

Safety is the first reason I chose this car. Besides my objective feeling towards the handling of this car, IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) has given Saab 93 the top safety pick award in consecutive years for its class. This is a feature more important than anything else to me, and that is why I always recommend this car to everyone I know.