Saab

Saab teaches owners how to drive their vehicles on an ice track.

Saab's European delivery program does what the others do, but differently. How fitting given that author Kurt Vonnegut was among Saab’s first U.S. dealers and the company once distributed bumper stickers that read, “Made by trolls in Trollhattan.”

The average discount off the MSRP is 9 percent, then Saab ponies up a $2,000 travel stipend. The program includes the 9-3 Convertible, 9-3 Sedan, 9-3 SportCombi, 9-5 Sedan and 9-5 SportCombi. 

The program begins when owners arrive in Gottenburg, Sweden. There, a driver meets them and whisks them off for dinner and dreams at Ronnum Manor in Trollhattan. Owners take delivery of their vehicles the next morning for no extra charge. Or they can take delivery in 15 other European cities, for delivery surcharges of $400 to $885.

Saab has 26 drop-off points in Europe, with fees ranging from 100 euros to 1,165 euros. Only Gottenburg and Bremerhaven are free.

But where Saab goes a little bit crazy is in its annual mid-winter, five-day Ice Experience program which costs $3,500 per couple. Owners gather in Stockholm for a night at the Nordic Light Hotel. They fly to Kiruna, 125 miles above the Arctic Circle. “I guess I expected a bus [in Kiruna]," says Pat Lanthier of San Mateo, Calif., who was picking up a 9-3 2.0T Convertible in 2006. “Then I heard ‘arf, arf, arf,’ and realized there were sled dogs.”

Saab bundled them into insulated snowmobile outfits and they took off, pulled by barking teams. “It was like the scenes from 'Dr. Zhivago' where they’re heading to the country place,” Lanthier says. “There was snow everywhere.”

Lunch is served at a wooden Laphut, then some more sledding to the Icehotel, where all the rooms and even the beds are made of snow and ice. There’s a full day of driving instruction in cars and snowmobiles. There’s test-drives on an ice track, with electronic stability control on, and again with it off. “You can really see how it is a safety feature,” says Lanthier, who crashed a car while driving on the ice. “The test-drivers kept saying, ‘Go faster, Patrick, go faster.’ And when I crashed, they said, ‘No problem Patrick, we have lots of cars.’”

The next day, the owners get a helicopter tour with a landing near Sweden’s highest point, Kebenkaise. After that, it’s all downhill, back to your car’s keys in Trollhattan.

Jody Thomas of Falls Church, Va., did the 2007 Ice Experience with her husband when she was six months pregnant. She found the program on the Saab website while comparing the 9-3 SportCombi with a similar Audi. Although they bought the Saab because it was less expensive, they opted for European delivery and the Ice Experience “as a kind of last hurrah.”

She left a loyalist. “My husband and I joke that it is probably the best marketing Saab could ever do," she says. "It made a huge impression on my husband how much they cared about the cars.”

Now that baby Quinn has arrived, Thomas is thinking ahead to her next new car — another Saab. “When he’s 7 or 8, we’ll go back for a new car, then go to Legoland,” she says.

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For more information, go to the Saab website.

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