> Under GM management.

There's a reason they ended up as a GM brand.

Saab was facing insolvency when GM bought 50% of the company. Would you have preferred the brand to die sooner?

Frankly? Yes. The drawn out death rattle was annoying to follow.

But if you list the causes of SAABs demise you get pretty far down the list before coming to "2 months vacation and 36 hour workdays" (it's 25 days and 39 hour work weeks btw).

So what were the causes? I was a Saab fan so I'm curious.

SAAB was never really a car company. It was an aerospace company that ended up owning a car manufacturer due to some mergers and ran its car division more like an eccentric hobby. The car part was never really well run or financially self-sufficient and that just became more obvious when the car part was eventually split off from the aerospace part.

edit: Just correcting my history slightly. SAAB actually started their eccentric car hobby before merging with a car manufacturer, partially due to to the end of WW2 leaving them with a surplus of engineers and capacity and wanting to put them to some use. The rest of my point basically stands

I'm sure someone has a good writeup, but as to my understanding they had a really weird lineup where the 9-5 competed with 9-3 and both were basically low-end luxury sedans marketed as family cars.

> The drawn out death rattle was annoying to follow

You're saying that a company that employees thousands of people should have died earlier and cost those folks their jobs because....it annoyed you personally?

You’re right. That was a poor choice of words on my part. My point was that it was obvious SAAB cars (neé SAAB Weapon Systems) wasn’t a viable business and the last few years were extremely drawn out and full of drama.

Why did GM have to buy them out?

More socialist countries are inherently bad a creating and maintaining profitable businesses.

So selling off a failing company on the open market to the highest bidder is socialist. But governments bailing out a failing car manufacturer to the tune of billions of tax payer dollars is free market capitalism? Got it.

They sold it off because they were bad at making money and keeping it running.

Your second sentence it a strawman. Of course it's not capitalism to bail out manufacturers. How's that working out for the US? All you've proven is that when the US implements socialist policies it's detrimental. So, thanks for proving my point.