10 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT… THE SAAB 99
To really understand what a major role the Saab 99 played in the Swedish company’s development, we will have to take a few moments to whizz over their history. We’ll take as our starting point April 1937, when the Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget (or SAAB for short) was founded with its headquarters in Trollhattan. It was formed specifically to develop airplanes and deliver them to the Swedish military for the conflict that everybody could see was coming.
Obviously, once that conflict was over the demand for military planes went into serious decline, but Saab had a workforce to employ. So in autumn 1945 they decided that a small car would be part of their postwar offering. The result was the streamlined Saab 92, revealed to the press in June 1947, although production proper did not start until the very end of 1949.
The Saab 92 had a transverse, two-cylinder, two-stroke engine of 764cc. It was replaced by the Saab 93 in December 1955, which had a three-cylinder two-stroke engine of 748cc, this time mounted longitudinally. The new model also
