Times of upheaval and need tend to inspire surges of technological and design improvements. During the major world wars, great minds worked overtime to make leaps in medicine, engineering and science. The world’s armed forces soaked up these advancements at first, but in the relatively calm p…
Same old Saab story? 
The Saab two stroke triples certainly had an unusual exhaust note. We had a guy that raced a 92 (oddly, he wasn't Swedish, he was Finnish) and his favourite venue was a local lake where they ice raced in winter.
I really like this one https://www.hagerty.com/media/car-profiles/saab-engineers-feared-this-twin-engine/
"Germany’s Volkswagen was one such high point. So was the BMC Mini. People-movers like these brought Europe out of the shell-shocked 1940s and into the second half of the 20th century".
Erm. Not so fast. The Morris Minor and the Austin A30/35 were contemporaries of the first Saabs and preceded the later Morris and Austin Minis that arrived around a decade later. These were the cars that brought Britain into the second half of the 20th century. The Mini brought us into the 'swinging 60s', Carnaby St., the Beatles, and all that.
Alec Issigoniss designed both the Morris Minor and a decade later the ground breaking Morris Mini Minor. Morris Cars sold 1.6 million Morris minors while Herbert Austin sold around half a million A30/35s before the Morris Mini Minor and the Austin Mini Seven arrived on the scene.
Saab were a very creative company. One advantage of their front engine FWD was the ease with which racers could put the powertrain into both single seat as well as two seat race cars such as the Quantum. When they eventually went to an inline four, still with FWD, they purchased the English Triumph 1850 engine and installed in inline but backwards. Saab intorduced the engine even before Triumph had the Dolomite sedan ready for production. Couragous too eh?
A few mistakes in the article: The Sonett II, and Sonett II V4 were not steel bodied, but had a steel floor and rockers. They had not only a fiberglass body (supported by the factory roll bar), but a fiberglass flip up front end, fiberglass bucket seats and dash as well. The lineage section also shows Sonett IIIs (big bumper) from '73, '74 captioned as a '67. Still all in all an excellent article, and considering the amount of press these cars get, as an owner of 3 of these cars I thank you for publishing it.
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