What's Wrong With This Picture: BAIC Designers Take A Saabatical Edition
Having acquired Saab’s old 9-3 and 9-5 platforms, Beijing Auto is wasting little time in putting the old Swedish warhorses back into action. In fact, if you cover the digitally-altered front end of this C71 concept, you’ll notice that it’s barely been changed. And that’s not all: at least one of BAIC’s two new SUV models seem to take more than a little inspiration from Jeep’s Wrangler and Grand Cherokee. Rather than simply ripping off popular models as other Chinese automakers do, BAIC’s designers seem only to seek inspiration from their partner firms. The weird part: BAIC has signed a deal to sell new, “real” Saabs at its Chinese dealerships. The real deal and the cheap, outdated knockoff sold in the same dealership? Even by Chinese standards, that’s a bizarre strategy. [via ChinaCarTimes]
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Not only does it look better than the slab-sided, demented-Audi pillbox that is the new 9-5, it looks better than the Chrome Mascara re-do that GM inflicted on us in 2006.
+1 on the comments that this doesn't look bad at all. If progress is hard creased and scalloped sides and a slammed greenhouse, color me Luddite. Don't like the insectile lights, but many, many other cars look far worse than this one. I think eventually we'll look back on the cars of the last few and next few years with all the fondness we now reserve for the boxy bodied fake landau roofed excrescences of the 70's and 80's.