The observant ones amongst you would have noticed a rather unusual looking Saab 9000 in some recent photos from the dealership tour in Germany.
Here’s one of them. And what’s that there in the back? A yellow Saab 9000?
A reader from the USA noticed this 9000 and wrote to me asking for some more information about it. I figured it might be good to feature it here on the website.
The car is actually a Saab 9000 converted to be a vehicle transporter. The Saab Museum has a few of these vehicles, converted by a Swedish company. This 9000 was built according to the same plans, but the job began with it’s first owner, a former Saab dealer in Germany.
The car is now owned by Autohaus Lafrentz GmbH, a Saab service partner in Kiel, Germany. I recently received the following information from Markus LaFrentz:
The car is a model year 1988 Saab 9000 CD 2.0Turbo with 163 Hp and a manual transmission. The car had had an accident in the rear end, so it was cut in two pieces and became the ideal candidate for this transporter conversion.
The previous owner nearly finished the car, but then his business came into some trouble and his company went bankrupt. My dad than helped him a little and bought all his cars from stock with the precondition to get the transporter also. He accepted the offer from my dad and we then got all his cars and “his baby”. The car has now driven nearly 180,000km.
In late 2009 we started a restoration job on the car and made some upgrades. The car has now the look of a 1994 CS. We also made the transport area a little wider and we added some nice Hella LED backlights for better visibility. The restoration took us nearly 10 months because it was only done when we had some free time for the repair job. We have had the car since 1993 and we have done a lot of transportation with it.
I don’t really know how long it took to build the car originally, but I think it was a long time and an even more expensive job than the guy first thougt. The biggest problem was to get the approval from the German authorities.
As far as we know, it is the only existing one in Germany.
Click to enlarge any of the images from the gallery below. My thanks to Markus for the background information.
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