Yahoo Autos Junkyard Gem: 1973 Saab 95
When the Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget began selling cars in addition to their lineup of military aircraft in 1949, the very first model was a goofy-looking machine with a DKW-derived two-stroke two-cylinder engine driving the front wheels. The 92 begat the 93 in 1955, and the 93 led to the 96 (sedan) and 95 (wagon) for 1960. A small but fanatical subset of American car shoppers with a taste for weird European machinery and good snow performance (including the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who was a Saab dealer in the late 1950s and early 1960s) loved the Saab 95/96, and discarded examples show up in our junkyards to this day. Here's one of those cars, found in a San Francisco Bay Area car graveyard recently.
There's a lot of the old 1950 Saab 92 in the general layout of the 95, but the smokey, chainsaw-sounding two-stroke engines got the axe after 1968. In its place went a Ford-designed V4 four-stroker. The engine and transaxle from this one are long gone, and some junkyard jokester dropped in a cylinder head out of a modern straight-five engine in their place.
The original V4 would have displaced 1.7 liters and was rated at 65 horsepower and 85 pound-feet.
The transmission was a four-speed manual with the shifter mounted on the steering column, called a "four-on-the-tree" rig by Americans (the three-speed version was far more commonplace here).
By 1973, the less-weird Saab 99 had been on sale in North America for a few years, and so the 95/96 was on its last model year here (sales in Sweden continued through 1978). The 99-based Saab 900 first showed up on our shores as a 1979 model … but traces of the original 92 lingered even in those cars.
The MSRP for this car was $3,095, or about $22,362 in 2023 dollars. The 99 started at $3,395 ($24,529 after inflation) for 1973.
