Anyone own or have experience of them.
I need a new car must be an estate, doesnt have to be huge, reasonable mpg
not too expensive as there are bikes to buy 😀

yep! lovely motor, get the 2.0 diesel as the 1.6D lacks any real pull

Had the 2.0 diesel for 7 years – great to drive and not too bad for maintenance.

Saab 9-3 Sports Wagons.
Was buying a new car a month or so ago. Was going to get a V50 but then caught on to Saabs. Less money buys newer, less miles, higher spec etc. Similar build quality and the Saab is much better for getting bikes in.

Just over £8,500 got me a less than 3 years old minter. 45k miles, immaculate, 150bhp, auto :-), climate, cruise, leather, the lot. (25K+ when new)

Alfa romeo 156 GTA sportwagon – perfect for 12mpg 🙂

watch out with that Saab, stanley. it’ll need a new cambelt at 72k & it’s not a cheap job.
I sold my 9-3 because I couldn’t afford that & the associated major service (and the 4 new tyres that it also would have needed) – estimated price would have been over £1k. Ok, take the tyres out of that equation & it’s still expensive

1.9 TiD engine….. cambelt at 90k….. so about 5 years away for me!!

Think I’d want to change any car’s cambelt by then. Can’t see why it would cost more to do/service than any other 2l turbo diesel?? Major service? It’s only fluids and filters… no valve clearances, timing, etc.
A friend (had a few Saabs) tells me that they are good to work on.

mine was a 1.9TiD too, 57 plate, and the handbook said 72k.

There was a whole kit of parts needed, £600 incl VAT & labour & that was at a local garage, not a Saab place.

I have a V50 1.6 Drive

Averages 52/53 mpg but has no performance! Get the 2.0 or 2.4, I would if was my money but the current one is a company car so had it for Tax reasons.

Before that I had a Saab 93.

The Volvo is better specced, better built and holds it’s value better.

The Volvo has now done 53k and I have had it from new. No problems, totally reliable.

The Saab I bought with 11k miles and at less than 15k it had a new EGR valve under warranty and a second one around the 90k mark.

So to conclude if it was my money I would buy the Volvo over the Saab.

I jsut traded my V50 2.0d in for it’s bigger brother, the V70. I really liked the V50 but it just wasn’t that big, either in the boot or the back seats. I’m only just six foot tall but with my seat set comfortable for driving, I couldn’t get a Maxicosi baby carrer in behind me and my two year old’s feet were more or less trapped between the back of my seat and his.

Also, be very aware that the 2006/7 models onwards need a DPF replacement around 80k miles, which costs £700. Having said that, I still really liked it; I only had it two years – I did have to replace the alternator (a few hundred pounds for a non Volvo part) and servicing was around £170 a year.

Volvo Selekt sales give you a one year warranty on everything bar consumables and is truly excellent cover.

Volvo dealers also tend to be very nice to deal with. So much so that I used to get my Ford C-Max serviced by them as I couldn’t bear to deal with the Ford dealership.

Think carefully about whether you ‘need’ a disel versus a petrol. If you’re doing sub 10k miles a year, there is a lot to be said for going second hand petrol as they are so cheap compared to their disel equivalents.

I picked up a 2.5T V70 SE Lux, which when new would have cost £35,000 and which three years later and with only 22,500 miles cost £14,000! The equivalent disel would have been £3000 more, which at 10k miles a year over five years meant the petrol was no more expensive to run than the more costly disel.

Ah, must have changed. 09 plate; book in front of me definitely says 90k

The thing that attracted me really was the purchase price. They are about 3k under book price owing to Saab’s demise. That’s an awful lot of servicing (that I don’t believe would cost more than any equivalent car). Further, how much more could they devalue; it’s lost £16k in 30 months!
Not bothered that they no longer exist; my car has already been made, parts are still made, people still know how to fix them.

I narrowed my search to a V50 or a 9-3. For the same money the V50 v 9-3 comparison was:
07/57 v 09
84k/96k v 45k
136 v 150 bhp
2 owners v 1 owner
Smaller boot v Bigger boot!

Insurance and rfl similar.

I do think that buying these “higher spec.” cars does come with some financial risk though, ie. so much to go wrong!!

Have no experience of the V50, though they look nice in an understated way. Owned a V40 several years back – horrendous clutch and dual mass fly wheel replacement (£1K, and that via local garage not main dealer), some electrical glitches and so/so driving pleasure.

As for Saabs – stanley, believe me, I love Saabs and am a member of the Saab owners club. Had them on and off for years – classic 900s and 9000s bulletproof and huge fun to drive, also brilliantly engineered. However…the latest 9-3s have been dumbed down by GM’s dodgy parts bin. No longer reliable as before. Things wear out far more quickly. GM is infact responsible for destroying Saab, and then blocking the sale of technical data to Chinese, Russians, Indians, you name them, so thus Saab goes bust. GM totally liable.

Don’t get me wrong – I have a 9-3 Sportswagon 1.9 TiD, but whatever it says on the service schedule, consider changing cambelt before 90K miles, along with the running gear and water pump. Alternators can be troublesome, EGR valves as you have heard, inlet manifolds on the pre 2008 cars, and the suspension is not that robust. Always use a Saab specialist, not the remnants of the old dealer network – cheaper and more knowledgable.

All that said, 9-3s are great to look at, very comfy and excellent for long journeys, and lovely to drive when everything works. Don’t worry about resale value – just drive them until they fall to bits! Mine now has 147K miles and spiralling, and goes pretty well with few problems – but I changed EVERYTHING listed above (including sports suspension kit) at 120K miles, having bought the car very cheaply.

I still dream that Saab will rise again, with proper financial backing and the freedom to engineer for themselves….but that’s just a dream!

yeah, sounds like they did indeed change it. I think there was a facelift too around that time – mine had the old headlights, newer model headlight assembly has a ‘line’ sidelight rather than the older simple bulb. not quite LED though.

I know what you mean about the boot though, the 9-3 boot is much bigger than a V50 (or a 3series touring for that matter) – one of the things I was looking at was the boot size

Yeah, think that is what I’m suggesting…

… Saabs have devalued so much that I see buying one now as a fairly safe bet. You lay out less cash now and go out and enjoy the thing. IF something does go wrong then you have the money saved from the purchase price.

Would be a bit miffed if I’d bought one just before they went bump though. Bloody GM.

Not many other suggestions here for the OP to look at?

Ps. would always change a cambelt at about 80k anyway

pps. typed that out ages ago- but got called out of the house by some kids to rescue a kitten from a tree 🙂
Needed the break from assignment writing anyway!