Car cover for Saab 9-3 Convertible

Next week we go to Croatia on a sailing vacation. Since the car will be the whole week parking in the marina with unknown weather, it can be from direct sun and 35°C up to strong storms. Nothing of the extremes is healthy for the car, especially for the soft-top roof.

So I bought a this car cover. Not from the linked site, but the same. I've tried today how it works :

It's size L, up to 4500mm length, the 9-3 convertible is 4654mm, which should be XL, but the local shop didn't had XL on stock and I cannot wait 2 weeks for delivery. So I took L and it fits imho OK. It's the Car Cover Dual, waterproof.

The mirrors must be retracted, the antenna must be screwed down and to cover the car I had to start from the front side of the car. That's it.

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Music for cabriolets : Jaga Jazzist - One-Armed Bandit

Jaga Jazzist is a great norvegian band, one of the key bands of the label Ninja Tune. They are currently one of the best live performing bands featuring besides drums, bass, guitars and keyboards a full brass section. Always 9-12 people at the stage, all of them are great instrumentalists and their shows are stunning. All of their songs are instrumental, only a very few singing.

The selected track is from their current album One Armed Bandit from last year. It makes me feel free in the convertible :) As well as the whole album. You can find more of their tracks on Soundcloud here, incl. some live records. 

Jaga Jazzist - One-Armed Bandit (Promo) by Ninja Tune

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Current Saab 9-3 Convertible Colours 2011

It looks like Saab is on the right track to skate out of the current crisis. The current 9-3 generation called Griffin contains also a convertible. The enthusiasts test can be found here. Let's look at the current colours Saab is offering at the moment. The screenshots have origin in the official international Saab configurator.

Arctic White

Black

Laser Red

Carbon Grey

Diamond Silver 

Glacier Silver

Java

Jet Black

Nocturne Blue

Oak Brown

These are the Aero builds. My favorites are Nocturne Blue, Oak Brown and Java. What are yours ?
You can play with the configurator starting here. 

Two things must be mentioned here:

The Independence Edition with special orange colour. Limited to 366 pieces. I don't know how many were ordered / sold, but they are still to buy on autoscout24.de (gasoline, diesel). The sticker "Sofort" (Immediately) means delivery, which seems they have them on stock.

And there will be soon after production restart a Sky Blue colour introduced.

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Music for cabriolets : Mitch Alive DJ Set

Music and cars are an important part of my life. They often they fit together so why not to have here a category of music for cabriolets. I am fully aware of the fact, that there is almost no difference between a music for car driving and music for cabriolets.

Also music is a very personal thing, so not there is impossible to cover everybodys musical tastes and styles. But a blog is often a personal thing as well, so the category Music for cabriolets will be a collection of recommendations for music which worked for myself. If you feel, it worked for you as well, please express it.

Also this is not a guidance for illegal downloading of music. There are many ways of legal obtaining it, I'm not responsible for how you do it.

The first recommendation is very recent and it is a DJ set called "I can make you dance" from DJ  Mitch Alive. It's a 51 minutes long funk mix, sometimes very sharp and average fast, never calming down. It's fine for a longer convertible ride in summer. There are some extraordinary instrumental performances and great grooves. Many 2-3 minutes long tracks, it's changing constantly.

For downloading use this link. Legal for free. Enjoy.

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Save Saab

/me belongs to the people worried about what will happen with Saab in the coming days. So my small contribution :

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The saga continues ...

In the recent days the news are stumbling on each other :

• last week Saab has admitted not to have cash for paying salaries to employees
• Kristina Geers leaves the board of directors but stays as a company counsel
• both work labor bosses are leaving the board as well

It doesn't look good. But today a chinese company ordered 582 Saabs worth 13M€ which will provide short-term funding to Saab and enables to pay the wages. The payment is expected this week.

Who else than Pang' Da or Youngman, the two future business partners of Saab (if NDRC approves) could be on the purchase order ?

The crisis is not over. If the claim, that total monthly spending of Saab is 19M€, is correct, than this order is very short-term. Now, when the production is stopped, the spendings are definitely smaller. After that there are still chinese orders for 45M€ and another several thousand orders to be produced. The 45M€ is most probably waiting for production re-start. But that's it. Let's hope the magician Victor Muller shows another of his tricks in effort to save Saab.

This week will definitely bring further news, hopely good ! 

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Save Saab on Facebook

There is an event appeared on Facebook, which is a symbolic expression of supporting Saab in it's efforts to survive. It's not the end at the monent, but bad things can happen. So if you are interested and have a Facebook account, the event is located here.

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Midsummer celebration in Brno

Midsummer is often refering to celebration around summer solstice and is often connected to scandinavian countries. But because this is a fine reason to celebrate or just to go outside, the events take place all over the world.

One of these events happened this weekend in Marianske udoli near Brno. A good programme for families with or without children or an opportunity to learn something new about a foreign culture. To organise an event for 2-3.000 people requires some funding, which was provided by the Embassy of Sweden, The Scandinavian House as well as several companies, so at this social event was present also a product advertisement but in reasonable amounts. Children had fun, I've learned something new at one of the presentations about the islands and sea near Stockholm and everybody was more or less happy.

One of the ladies from the Saabunderground.cz crew had the good idea to offer to the organisators a small exhibition of Saab cars, undoubtly belonging to the picture of Sweden in the world. According to her, it took a bit time for them to understand, that nobody wants any money from anyone, that just a fan club offers something unusual which fits into the concept very well. After this they welcomed the offer. Of course :)

Saabunderground guys invited me and I was delighted to join them. Part of the event was a small competition in camembert preparation, everybody did it on their own style. To me it hasn't to have a winner, all of the styles were Nr.1.

One of the magnets was a beautiful Saab 96 restored by an enthusiast. Everything restored with heart and original parts with some very nice details.  The owner gladly explained everything to everybody. See the picture below, some other pics are here. The owner (with the black Saab cap on the back side of the car) knows everything about the car, to the smallest detail. The restoration from a car standing last 15 years in a dusty, wet and falling garage took ~1 year.

Another magnet was this Saab 99 car in "police tuning" :) I saw it more times at pictures but didn't know who it belongs to. So was a nice surprise when it came driven by a friend from the saabunderground crew. More pictures are located here.

Then there were present a this 900NG cabrio, 2x 9000, couple of 9-3's, my 9-3 cabrio and this 9-5.

I never thought, that once I buy a car, I will go to exhibit it somewhere. I know it is a charismatic and very intelligent designed car, but exhibition is something completely different. At least I thought so. So my ego was massaged, because many people were going around my car as well, asking questions, making pictures, young ladies asked for pictures sitting in the cockpit etc. At the end it was a great feeling to sit into the car and drive 150km back home through backroads and without the roof.

I wondered a bit about the absence of Volvo as well as someone from local Saab dealers with a car. Of course they were contacted. They had a unique opportunity to showcase the new 9-5 (they have couple of them) in confrontation to older models. In a very natural context and for free. There were some 2-3.000 people, families with children, some of them well established according to some cars I've seen there parking.

The excuse "it's Saturday" doesn't count. It's black or white - either I like my work and do it with passion nearly non-stop or not. Another statement saying "the community doesn't mean too much to us, they will never buy a new Saab" smells after amateurism and short-time thinking. A car like Saab doesn't sell itself through bilboards, catalogues and some rides with a display car. The awareness must be awaken and maintained drop by drop, in creative ways and long-term. In the fan family are many people which are candidates for a new Saab. I am one of them. Or the 9-5 mentioned before is a company car. Look at the picture above, do you see the couple (boy in white, lady in green) looking at a possible family car ? There were tons of such couples. I understand, that dealers, historically Opel, Chevrolet and Saab are promoting more selling cars, but why they do Saab then ? And why Saab doesn't let it to do people with passion ? If the current Saab crisis goes good, Saab has a big problem with channel and its reactive (maybe even not that) instead of proactive approach. If someone from Saab reads this, please be aware of this and take some actions. If a partner doesn't care about the vendor, the numbers will never go up. It's same in Slovakia btw... Enough business talk ...

I didn't waited for the end of the Midsummer event, which usualy ends with a big bonfire, I had 150km driving back home. One strange thing happened on that day. There were 2-3 rainshowers through the day. Through one of them i was sitting in the car, playing with the navigation and learned how to include a place catched by the GPS into the adress book / database. So I did it. On my way home, after some 15km I've realised, that I forgot my camera there. Since the place has no adress and this part of the world is weakly covered in the GPS navigation, I would have a problem to find it again.  But the adress book entry was ready and I was back pretty quickly. Karma ?

The way back was very comfortable. I took this road. It's not that strong to recommend it in a separate blog entry, but it was a nice cabrioway home accompanied with some sharp groovy funk music mix.

I'd like to express my thanks to the saabunderground.cz crew for the organisation and invite. It was very fine to see you and looking forward to our next meeting somewhere.

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R.I.P. Peter Falk - Lieutenant Columbo

He seemed scatterbrained but was very smart. To evoke underestimation was only one of his many tricks to convict the criminal. This was Lt. Columbo alias Peter Falk. One of the best TV series ever, which accompanied me since the young years. Both language versions I saw - the german and the czech were greatly dubbed. Another role in a remarkable movie stays in my mind forever - Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) from Win Wenders, where Peter Falk played himself as "Der Filmstar" besides Bruno Ganz or  Nick Cave.






One of the famous signs of Lt. Columbo was his convertible, a Peugeot 403 Grande Luxe Cabriolet. Manufactured in 1959 in a rare edition of 504 pieces as a 2-door 4-seat convertible.

The best description I could find is on Columbo fansite - here. It's a great summary of all interesting facts about the car.

If you would rather see a video coverage of the car, here we go :



Rest in peace Peter Falk.

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CNN on the latest issues of Saab

A coverage on what is going on from CNN :



Keep up to survive Saab !

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Wild poppy time ...

On a recent weekend bike trip to Moravia, we've spotted a not very often appearing and beautiful wild (dwarf) poppy field. It was at least 500x500m large, maybe more. On the way back home - with the Saab convertible of course - we tried to come closer to it, because we failed to do this with on the bikes. A small road through the fields led around.

This is often a banned thing around the world, so maybe you will like at least some pictures.

The place is approximately here.

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Saab Tri-Fuel wins the Gröna Bilister (Green Motorists) prize for Best environmental car

Gröna Bilister (Green Motorists) is every year holding a competition in several categories. The best pick of  of swedish motor journalists in one of the most important categories Best environmental car the winner is Saab 9-3 TriFuel.

The three fuels which this Saab can make use of are bioethanol / biogas / gasoline and the cars are built in the ANA Trollhättan facility.  The engine is 1.8T.

You can read a test of this car made in May 2011 here.

Source and picture : Saabsunited.

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Saab 9-3 Aero Convertible Griffin on Saabsunited

A nice review of the Saab 9-3 Griffin Convertible can be found on Saabsunited.com. This review covers the convertible mostly from the usability side therefore I like it much more, than the usual short and table based reviews.

Saab 9-3 Griffin Convertible is the latest version of the beautiful 9-3 Convertible. It has reworked front and rear sides and several nice small details in the interior. The most visible Griffin Convertible is the Independence Edition, limited to 366 pieces. The piece in the review is 2.0t BioPower version with automatic transmission. Many pictures, many initial experiences.

Here is a list of them :

part 1 - a starting point
part 2 - mainly highway driving experience
part 3 - interior
part4 - soft-top roof operation and fuel consumption after normal driving
part5 - remote roof operation (can be found also at the start of my 9-3 video)
part6 - baggage in the boot + wind deflector (seems to be exactly as mine)
part 7 - acceleration tests (2.0t automatic, 220HP with E85 fuel)
part 8 - going to work with roof down + baggage
part 9 - dashboard instruments + navigation
part 10 - more pictures

It's a positive review written by enthusiasts driving Saabs for longer time for the rest of the world. The discussions below the articles also bring a lot of insight.

One sentence catched my eyes several times :

"While driving to the shopping mall we decided that we are going to buy a car like this, every time we get into the car we fall in love with it."

This is exactly what I am feeling as well. It is not only because it's a convertible but because of the character or charisma. It was many times discussed why the enthusiasm and customer loyalty of Saab fans is so large, but this is maybe for another  long blogpost.

Enjoy the summer.

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Mandatory technical check after 4 years car age

In Slovakia each car has to go to a mandatory technical check 4 years after first registration and than each 2 years again. Today was the D-day. Although my Saab is in excellent condition, I was a bit afraid, because the guys are known for always finding something and making problems.

The result, amount of issues : ZERO 

Not even these small unimportant issues. Without any kind of "motivation".

Fantastic. It was again confirmed, that this buy was a good buy. Currently it has ~65.000km.

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Mythbusters : driving a convertible in rain without the roof

In an older part of Mythbusters, they want to confirm or disconfirm the myth, that if you drive a convertible in a rain, the interior stays dry. Basically it's about when it starts to rain unexpected, if you have to stop immediately or drive to a first dry place, for ex. gas station and close the top there.

Because in this part Mythbusters are busting also 2 another myths, I've tried to link the relevant parts as good as possible. And because Mythbusters are declining video embed, I am linking it via text.

 ......................................................................................................................................

Simulation - 00:00 - 03:00, first try on a car model + preparing water indicators for the seats in real car

Driving in rain at different speeds - 00:00 - 03:10, driving at 25 mph (40km/h) and 55 mph (88 km/h)

Faster driving and conclusion - 00:26 - 04:30, driving at 70 mph (112km/h), 90 mph (145 km/h)

......................................................................................................................................

It was to expect, the more speed the less water in the car.

But for a real life, this is not usable at all.

If your're in the city with low speed limits, you will get wet. Prepare to clean the interior completely.

If your're outside of the city with up to 90-100km/h speed limit, you may have a small chance for a roof-up stop. Otherwise you will get wet from the other cars from the street.

Well and who drives with a roof down on a highway. Loud, windy and not too funny. Besides the fact, that to drive 90 mph (145 km/h) through a rain is dangerous.

I've tried once to drive in kind of middle-intensive rain with the soft-top down, 100-110 km/h on back roads. The front and the rear seats stayed dry. Everything behind was wet. That was fine for some 20 minutes, than you ask yourself if you are normal or not.

Maybe interesting on this is, that water apparently behaves different than air. Otherwise it wouldn't be a wind deflector needed. While water comes out of the car at a bigger speed, air comes inside and creates a curl at least in the 4 seats convertibles, simmilar to the blue pickup on the left. The bigger speed, the more stronger curl.

Whatever. You don't need to be a meteorologist or a ship captain to know when a rain could come.

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Retro Saab pieces

Just a bunch of imho nice and stylish pictures found while browsing around ...

source

source

source

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SkyBlue colour Saab 9-3 Griffin Convertible MY2012

I am remembering my older blog post about recent Saab colour offering which seems to me a bit "monochromatic". But this is a general trend and it is understandable, that it makes no sense to pee against this wind too much. With one exception : convertible.

Besides the Sunset Red Independence Edition (limited to 366 pieces) Saab is introducing SkyBlue for the 9-3 Griffin Convertible for the model year 2012. It was originally posted at Saabsunited in form of "spyshots" a month ago is now official and named and will soon appear in the offerings and configurators around the globe.

                                                                                          picture source : saabsunited.com

Finally. Very very nice. It reminds on Electric Blue from the previous generations (around MY06) but this is a nice and safe colour. The roof colour remains open, but as on the previous models, blue is obvious as well as optional black. The current roof colour options are black as standard, blue, grey and sand. Here they are : 

                                                  picture source : Saab global web configurator

My favorite is the last one - sand colour, although not very practical but wonderful. But maybe Saab comes with a surprise...

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