75 years of Saab spirit at the Saabfestival 2022 – part 1

Last week, Trollhättan was once again filled with hundreds and hundreds of Saabs as many enthusiasts from all around the world had gathered to celebrate their support for this renowned car brand. The sights were amazing and I literally took several hundreds of pictures, and I’m sharing several of them in this first post about the Saabfestival 2022. More to come soon!

Friday, 10 June

The first official day of the Festival started relatively quiet. I had arrived the evening before and when I checked out the area around the Saab Car Museum, I couldn’t really see that much evidence yet of what would -again- turn out to be one of the world’s largest gatherings of Saab cars…

Great deals at the Saab fair, speeches at the museum, and more

In good Swedish fashion, the event kicked off at 10:00 sharp when the museum doors opened and the first event visitors could buy their Festival passes and listen to one of the several Saab-related presentations, or simply to admire the great Saab collection the museum has on display.

And, as always, the market place turned out to be an attractive destination for many Saab fans to find some bargains for their cars. It turned out that it was great that the vendors were indoors (as the weather gods weren’t too nice during the first part of the Friday), but sadly the scale of market place was much smaller than during earlier Festivals, as this time only corporate sellers were allowed.

And… the photo opportunity of a lifetime…

Of course the “pièce the résistance”, the centerpiece of the event, was the special 9-5NG/9-4X photo opportunity that we had announced earlier. As during the previous similar shoots in 2017 and 2019, the goal was to gather as many of Saab’s latest (and last) models in a unique “Saabish” location, and this time around, although we were hopeful of a big turnout, we were actually not that sure that many would indeed show up, especially from abroad. But how wrong we were… we easily broke our previous record and gathered no less than 127 NG’s and 9-4Xes (in fact, technically we were 128 in the parking lot gathering for the shoot, but one 9-5NG SportCombi, the Java brown “nr 9” had to leave earlier).