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(Thu 18 Sep 08) Nearly 25 years after its first four-seat convertible went into production, Saab will display its latest thoughts on open-top motoring at the Paris Show next month.
Strictly speaking, the 9-X Air concept is based on the Targa roof principle rather than on a conventional convertible. The large rear pillars are fixed to the car, and what happens is that the fabric roof folds into a storage compartment between them when asked to. The roof itself has no rear screen - there's a proper glass window, which retracts to let the roof fold away, and then reappears once this has happened. The 9-X Air has no bootlid; instead, the luggage compartment (which can store two golf bags) emerges from underneath the rear light bar. Unlike the roof, this isn't a powered system, but it's spring-loaded, and the compartment runs on rollers, so it shouldn't be too heavy to operate.
In other respects the 9-X Air is basically the same as the 9-X BioHybrid, which runs on E85 bioethanol and is both fast and economical, as reported in a previous news story. |
