Saab NINES Articles
What is the Problem?
I found the article "Cars You Love to Hate" (in the May 2004 issue of Motor Age) upsetting, motivating me to write this column. The information in this report (summarized in the chart) was compiled and conducted jointly with "AFTER-MARKET BUSINESS" and "MOTOR AGE" magazines. They have used information from manufacturers, program groups, jobbers, retailers, dealerships, independent shops, consumers and "do-it-yourselfers." I would think that this is a good cross-section of the motoring public. While you may shrug your shoulders at the results, they affect everyone: if people perceive your car as being of inferior quality, it will have lower resale and trade value, and it will be more difficult to find people to work on it. Vehicle quality may seem like an obvious measure but I think it is related to the ease of repair and information access. Regardless of a vehicle’s actual quality, if a technician finds it difficult to diagnose and repair he will not likely view it as a quality car unless its manufacturer has an overwhelming reputation for quality (such as Mercedes-Benz). Ease of repair is related once again to information access. Another qualifier not shown on the chart is training. How easy is it to repair even the simplest problem if you have very little idea of how a component works? What if you have no repair manual or the repair manual is very difficult to obtain?
In response to this "MOTOR AGE" article, I did a little research on my own. Folks continually tell me that it is hard to find someone to work on their Saab or that if they have work done on it, the technician complains about the cars. The first shop owner I interviewed is an independent who works on all brands of cars at a three-man shop in another state. He told me that his shop doesn’t mind working on Saabs but doesn’t get much volume. Consequently, problems are more difficult to diagnose. The owner also told me in certain terms that his closest franchise dealer wasn’t very helpful with information and didn’t stock many parts. He said that it just made the cars harder to deal with because it takes longer to diagnose problems. Without information and/or parts, Saabs are ultimately more expensive to maintain.
The second shop owner I interviewed said he was actually trained by John Moss of Saab USA in 1969. This owner has worked in several franchise dealerships over the years and still works on mostly Saabs. As an independent, he has relegated himself to mostly older cars. He told me that he has given up trying to keep up with the new information and equipment. He has decided to repair the older cars but not the new ones. It is just too expensive in time and money for him.
So, how hard or expensive does it get? The worst case I have read about has to be the aluminum cars (not Saabs) that have come out lately. There are five cars now with all aluminum body and frames. For example, there are only 13 body shops in the whole country authorized to repair the Jaguar XCJ8. It is said to cost about $200,000 for the specialized equipment necessary for the proper repair. John Paul, who works with AAA of Southern New England, claimed in the April 19th issue of the "Christian Science Monitor" that some of the service manuals are up to 1 million pages and are available only electronically.
In the past, say up to 2003, there was information that trickled out from the franchise Saab dealerships who also sold the special tools needed to repair Saabs. With government/industry agreements the manufacturers were required to provide the tools and information to the independents so "you the consumer" had a competitive market place to obtain service for your cars. Almost all of the manufacturers complied in varying degrees as you can see in the survey results in the chart. It is common knowledge that General Motors is great at providing training and information for anyone who buys Delco (GM brand name) parts with any volume. Traditionally, GM would train all independent technicians for FREE if they used Delco parts. It is no coincidence that GM vehicles were ranked relatively well in the Motor Age survey: GM branded products (cars, etc) can be serviced anywhere. Why not a Saab?
An independent technician—or anyone else for that matter—who wants tools and information, must go now to the Saab website. (www.saabtechinfo.com). There you will find Workshop Information System (WIS) subscription information. This site is administered by AC Delco and is acquired by subscription only. One day of information is $10, one month is $75 and 3 months is $180. One year is $500. They list five categories of information that are available. This information is not too expensive and looks pretty complete but then again I haven’t had to subscribe to it yet. Once you have the information on how to fix the car, you have to order the service tools on another spot on the website. There are lots of tools, but the ones you can’t do without are the Saab Tech II at $5499 and the (Technical Information System (TIS) starter kit at $1495. If you have decided to make the move to this level, you’ll then need the self-training material also found on this website. There are 20 or so manuals available at costs ranging from $7.75 up to $50 each. You have to buy some of the training information and plan to spend some time (probably lots) with it if you expect to have much success fixing the problems of today’s Saabs. So, if you are an independent shop with a handful of Saab customers, how much are you going to spend in time and money to serve them? We’re talking about $7000 plus just for the basic tools needed to trouble-shoot the cars and we still may not know how to use the equipment. How about this? The Saab 9-2 is a Subaru. This will take another scan tool, new training, information, etc., etc., etc. How about a 9-7? And on it goes……
I hope you can see that it is not economical for a small independent shop to invest all this for one limited brand of car. I feel that it would be in Saab’s best interest to train as many technicians as possible and to obtain the proper equipment to service the cars. A few years ago, when Joel Mamby was CEO at Saab USA, he said that Saab should be responsible or at least interested from "cradle to grave!" At that time, I had hopes that we were making progress on training for independent shops. Not much has changed. With just over 200 dealerships across the whole country, Saab’s reputation will probably decrease in the repair industry as the number of cars increase. Saab needs an adequate number of trained technicians across the whole country not just the typical metro dealer locations. You can read on the Saab Tech information website that 80% of cars out of warranty are serviced by independents. If the independents can’t properly repair the cars, might they recommend the purchase of some other brand? So what is Saab’s problem? Saab wants to sell more cars and improve their reputation. Looks like the answer is simple.