The automotive world might be set to gain the most intriguing electric sedan since the Lucid Air. According to a report from the Swedish arm of German motoring magazine Auto, Motor und Sport, the NEVS Emily GT has found a buyer who wants to turn the lights on in Trollhättan once again, producing cars once again in the very town that made Saabs for more than half a century.
But wait, what is the Emily GT? Well, there are two answers: A short one and a long one. The short answer is that it’s an all-electric four-door super sedan. The long answer? It’s a Saab by any other name. See, after Saab went under, its assets and talent were acquired by a Swedish company called NEVS. After cranking out a handful of electric 9-3s, NEVS was acquired by Chinese conglomerate Evergrande, which soon after found itself financially embroiled in a housing market crisis. Several years into an extended period of so-called dormancy, NEVS popped back up out of nowhere with a brand new prototype.
Although the Saab name now belongs to the Saab aerospace company due to some undoubtedly complicated legal stipulations following the bankruptcy of Saab Automobiles, NEVS retained much of Saab Automobiles’ talent. Possibly due in part to the ex-Saab Automobiles team behind the Emily GT, the resulting product looks very familiar to anyone who’s seen a 2011 Saab 9-5. The floating pillar, the abundance of sheetmetal, the soft lines — all signs this car could’ve only come from one place on earth.
The stats of the Emily GT are as impressive as they are weird: 600-plus miles of range, 484 horsepower, 175 kWh battery pack, quad-motor all-wheel-drive with true torque vectoring thanks to four in-hub electric motors. Unsprung mass? Erm, well, it’s not the end of the world. Besides, the packaging benefits of hub motors are brilliant, so why not give it a shot? Sometimes you just have to see if crazy will indeed equal genius, and Saab engineers have historically proven a strong correlation.
Crazier still, the prototype is a fully-functional car. A Top Gear road test claims everything inside the car works, from infotainment to steering wheel-mounted audio controls. Oh, and don’t think of this as some parts-bin car either. The electronic shifter is unique, as is the user experience. Sure, there’s a big emergency stop button in the console, but fundamentally, this is a real motor vehicle. It’s certainly not finished, but it’s all too production-like to ignore.
So, does this mean that the Saab faithful will soon have something new to enjoy? At this point, it’s too early to say. Just because a buyer for the project has been found doesn’t mean everything will go into production without a hitch, let alone U.S. availability. Still, it’s a spark of good news we certainly weren’t expecting.
(Photo credits: NEVS/Plint Creative Agency)
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Nobody over at NEVS asked me, but rather than a $65K fancypants sedan with batshit 0-60 times, they ought to apply the general design and principles (hub motors) to a car that more folks might actually want to buy 3-4 years from now, when Tesla’s Model 2 will perhaps exist. That means: a decently appointed Saabish-looking car with a cavernous hatchback, some clever design, and an emphasis on safety/practicality.
Why does this look like a clone of the lucid air?
Considering it is 15 years old, perhaps it is the other way around?
Is there really any compelling reason to believe that NEVS will sustainably and profitably produce this thing, or anything else for that matter? Saab and its various successors have been dead in the water since the GM bankrupty. There’s already dozens of BEV startups, most of whom won’t survive. Legacy auto is getting into the BEV space in a big way, especially in Europe, one of the most competitive BEV markets in the world. The price point this thing theoretically would be at is already way oversaturated. They may have produced a functional car and that’s all well and good. Actually manufacturing, marketing and distributing it is another thing altogether.
I think that Lordstown Motors has a better chance of making it than this NEVS Emily.
What’s that one song by that one band? Something about, “if I had a million dollars…”
“… I’d buy you a NEVS Saab…
But not a real NEVS Saab that’s cruel…”
That would be The Barenaked Ladies.
And if you had JUST a million dollars to invest in NEVS, you’d be broke in no time.
From the headline I was led to believe there’s a car called the “Wild Emily GT” coming out. I’m mildly disappointed.
I never realized I wanted one of those until this moment.
I thought the same thing. Wild Emily is a great name for a car.
Great, now I’m replaying my fantasies about Ms. Blunt.
The interior depresses me beyond words. Everything else about this car makes me want it, but the prospect of spending my time faced with those two lifeless rectangles and that anodyne, hospital waiting room interior design just fills me with ennui.
So many Saabs over the years have had joyous, driver-focused interiors that really paid off the old slogan “born from jets.”
Come on, NEVS. Just because something’s Swedish doesn’t mean it has to feel like it came from IKEA.
Huh, it does have a Siemens industrial look to it, like it’s the control center for an MRI. The wimpy charcoal tones don’t help.
Even the outside is a bland “yeah, that’s a car” and the big mouth on the front (& other cars) is bad
Good news (in a James May voice). Having owned several Saabs in the past, would love to see it happen. That said the epic saga of Saabs zombie like state post GM is just hard to keep up with anymore :-/ Bravo for trying to keep the weirdness alive…
One of the first cars I lusted after as a teen was a 1976 SAAB 99 and I’d love to get excited about this, but I’m not sure I believe this news. I mean, it is coming from Trollhättan…
Designed by Sven.
You mean the tree trunk in trunks Sven?
Is that NEVS as in this is nevs going to happen?
Saabs built some of the most fun cars I’ve ever owned. If this really makes it to production from Trollhättan with some of the same engineers, I would have to take a hard look, regardless if it was a Chinese company behind them, something I thought I would never say.
Question for Hubert: would increasing the tire sidewall on a hub-motored car compensate, at least partially, for the increased unsprung mass? Seems like the more the sidewall flexes for potholes, speed-bumps, etc., the less the hub moves. I would think the torque vectoring would compensate for a lot of the loss of stiffness of the sidewalls when cornering.
Probably, but speaking as someone who fat bikes, the problem with using tires as suspension is that they’re undamped. It tends to make for a bouncy ride. I would imagine tuning a suspension where you have undamped tires suspending a hub motor which is itself suspended by damped suspension would be a bit of a nightmare.
That a nice looking Lucid Air
It’s actually not all that complicated. It just seems like it until you actually read up on it a bit.
Saab Automobile AB was created when Saab AB designed a car and decided to build it. Saab AB merged with Scania-Vabis (SAAB-SCANIA) and Saab Automobile remained a division within that. In ’89, Saab AB restructured and Saab Automobile AB was spun out as an independent company, which GM took a 50% ownership stake in, and Saab AB had the other 50%.
So, Saab Automobile AB, still part of Saab AB, up until 2000. Then GM exercised their option to buy the remaining 50%, which included permission to use the Saab name, logos, and trademarks.
In 2010, Spyker N.V. (of the Netherlands, generally pretty chummy with Sweden) bought Saab with backing from the EIB and the Swedish government. Saab AB, not wishing to anger their customer, said ‘sure, they can transfer permission.’
And then Victor Muller’s entire fantasy imploded. Spyker sold the sportscar arm, planned to change their name to Saab-Spyker or Spyker-Saab, and instead ran out of suckers. His buddy Vladimir Antonov, a criminal banker (and criminal banker) applied to become a shareholder. Sweden and EIB both said “uh, you think we’re stupid? Fuck off.”
Then a Chinese company without the blessing of Beijing tried to jump in. They bailed out as soon as Sweden said they couldn’t just lift tooling and blueprints. (Hawtai; their entire ‘portfolio’ is literally nothing more than stolen IP from other manufacturers.)
Then came Youngman (who makes cars for such illustrious clients as Iran and North Korea) and Pang Da (a Chinese dealership network) with $140M in cold, hard cash. Upon which, GM and Saab AB both declared outright that there was no way in hell they’d permit a Chinese manufacturer also known for IP theft to have access to any of their patents or technology or even so much as a torque to yield bolt, and blocked the deal.
Which brings us to NEVS. NEVS (National Electric Vehicle Sweden) is about as Swedish as the Swedish Chef. (CHÖKLIT MÖÖSE!) Surprise! It’s a bunch of Chinese companies who were looking to loot and pillage the IP! Which is why Sweden blocked the sale of Saab Automobile Parts AB. GM refused to license or sell anything to them. And Saab AB and Scania AB both said “yeah, fuck no we’re not letting them use the griffin. If they build a Saab car, they can call it a Saab, and that’s it.”
And defenders of NEVS? Yeah, no. They built a few hundred cars out of parts they had lying around and bought on the open market, loaded up the tooling and every shred of IP they could get their hands into anything they could fit it in, and spirited it off to China before claiming that Qingdao Qingbo Investment Co Ltd had never given them the money and the founder had been paying out of pocket the whole time.
Yeah, funny thing? They never paid any of their bills. Not a one. Given it was always the Evergrande ponzi.
Last time it was a “state-owned IT company” that was a transparent shell and the city of Tianjin development authority. And oh, look at that, they built a factory in Tianjin to try and crank out 9-3’s using the tooling they took from Trollhatten. (Which they never even managed, such is the level of their incompetence.)
Functional or not, the whole thing is a scam. Pure scam. Every time it’s been “we just need one more investor and then we’re gonna BRING SAAB BACK!” Every. Single. Time.
And there’s no NEVS to buy. They evacuated all the worthwhile assets and entered ‘permanent hibernation’ with voluntarily liquidation of all assets to avoid a bankruptcy in March of this year. If they filed for bankruptcy, Sweden would have seized any cash and assets for sale.
NEVS has been completely dead since March. There are no investors. There is nothing to buy.
And what truly sucks is that the Swedish folks are the ones who got screwed. Every single fucking time.
What a history and what a recap. It’s a shame it’s true.
The need for so much context is why I stopped trying to explain our SAAB 96 Lemons team name and logo from about a decade ago:
https://www.murileemartin.com/UG/LWA12/LWA12-UG-085.jpg
I’m still pretty happy with our simplification of the original Spyker motto, though.
Now THAT is a Saab man! Great write up – being a Saab enthusiast means I knew most of it as it unfolded, but I’ve honestly never seen it so succinctly written out. Bravo!
Good write up, I still search for Saab or NEVS news from time to time in some weird (futile) hope Saab is coming back… I know it’s dead, but maybe, just maybe…. Yeah no.
This was informative. Thank you.
NEVS (National Electric Vehicle Sweden) is about as Swedish as the Swedish Chef. (CHÖKLIT MÖÖSE!) Surprise! It’s a bunch of Chinese companies who were looking to loot and pillage the IP!
No surprise there. Any serious company would have coined the name Swedish Vehicle Electric Nationale’.
And perhaps it is the alcohol and the depression, but I realized that if I won the lottery?
I probably would approach Saab AB, and be forthright with them. I can’t bring back what was lost. But Sweden has a team. They know their shit. I can’t hire them all. I can’t put Trollhatten back to it’s former glory.
But I can do something. And that something is take the IP and build high dollar, modern, supercar Saabs. Saabs that collectors and heads of state and fanatics would buy at high margins. Viggens with 300+HP to the front wheels. 9-5’s that put Genesis to shame. Forget near luxury; just go for it.
And I’d buy the whole Trollhatten plant (if the Swedes helped) and subdivide it. Small volume true Saabs over in this section. Customer cars relying on Swedish engineering over here. And sublet building over here.
It’s not what they deserve. But it’s something.
I’d love to see modern successors to the original 96 as well as the Sonnett. Both of these cars were lightweight and had industry-leading drag coefficients for their class and time period. The original Sonnett had a Cd value of 0.29, and the 96 a 0.30, which for the time period, were both really good and hold up well by today’s standards.
Imagine a 400 horsepower FWD Sonnett with a 2.4L turbo 4, weighing in around 2,300 lbs, with a CdA value comparable to a VW XL1. Give it a dual-axis front suspension to reduce torque steer. It would create for itself a massive gap in front of a Civic Si at the Nürburgring, and be a halo car for highway fuel economy, without even having a hybrid drive system. If sufficient stability could be achieved(just enough downforce to avoid net lift, no more), this could be a car to exceed 200 mph top end.
Take that same engine, transmission, suspension, and layout and put it into an ultra-streamlined compact sedan shaped sort of like a jet airplane, also with a CdA value comparable to a VW XL1, maybe weighing in around 3,000 lbs. Now you have the new 96. It could come in two variants, a hybrid with the 4-cylinder engine kept naturally aspirated that gets about 50 mpg city and 70 mpg highway, and the 96 Viggen, a 400 horsepower turbocharged version that has no hybrid drive system, but still exceeds 50 mpg highway.
Even greater efficiency is within reach by leaving out that extra letter in the middle: Sonett.
Fantastic summary, thank you!
No, that’s actually not that complicated at all!
What an interesting name for a car. I wonder if there’s a story behind it.
In the meantime, what are the best cars that have people names? Go!
The Merkur XR4Ti, named after Elon’s kid.
COTD
He names everything X something.
Mazda Laputa.. do peoples nickname’s count?
The Mazda bongo friendee was named after springer spaniel….or so I claimed.
This name brings me even more joy than the Nissan Homy Super Long, which I didn’t think was possible.
I’ve always been partial to the first car the Top Gear idiots built. It’s name was Geoff.
Otherwise, I recently realized that I have kissed more Elises in my life than any other name. No, I have not kissed a Lotus Elise, but maybe I should.
I kissed my Lotus Elise once, it tasted of dusty paint.
I never did it again, I reverted to giving it a little appreciative pat on the fender after a good drive, and screaming at it for being a bastard when it wouldn’t start.
So Volvo has Polestar and [ what once was ] Saab has NEVS.
the choices, the choices…