Saab 96 Archives - Swadeology

Video: Saab 96 on For The Love Of Cars

I’ve just finished watching this episode of For The Love Of Cars and I just had to share it here. It’s a great story, but even more than that, it’s a great little Saab 96.

There’s a bit of a story to this. The program you’re about to see was aired on Channel 4 in Britain last Sunday. The auction you see in the video was actually conducted back in January, but the day before the show went on TV (i.e. last Saturday), the car was auctioned once again.

The reasons behind all this back-and-forth become clear at the end of the show and it’s a touching story. I haven’t been able to find the price from last weekend’s auction but hopefully it’ll become public soon.

About the car – it’s a basic Saab 96 from the early 70’s but it wins the boys over completely with its engineering and its charm. It made my want to go hunt one down, actually.

The program goes for 50 minutes. Enjoy.

Saab 96 crash test – 1967

I found some still images of some early crash tests back in April and published them here on Inside Saab at that time.

Last week, we found the film from one of these tests. It’s from August 1967, and involves a frontal impact test performed on a Saab 96 at a speed of 50 km/h. It’s enjoyable both from a technical point of view, as well as being a window back in time into how things looked and worked back in the late 1960’s. The track they use today for crash testing at Saab is still in the same location, though it’s now much more sophisticated – and indoors 🙂

There is no audio.

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I’m not sure I would have wanted to be the crash test dummy used in that test – both seat and seatbelt technology has come a long way since that time. I have to say, however, that the passenger compartment of the 96 help up remarkably well from the impact, much better than many other cars from this earlier era would have done.

Saab crash testing – old school style

I was up at the Saab Technical Center yesterday, gathering some material for a post that will appear here on Inside Saab next week, when I saw these fantastic old black and whites showing some Saab crash testing conducted back in the late 1960s.

Saab’s crast test facility here in Trollhattan is now a very high-tech affair, having been completely refurbished just a few years ago. I’m hoping to visit there in the next few days as they’ll be conducting some tests that I hope to share here on site (no promises, now, but fingers crossed).

As you can see from these photos, the crash test facilities of the 1960’s were somewhat more spartan and weather dependent.

Enjoy.