Good thing for Saab mechanics that Saabs have come a long way since Kurt Vonnegut used to sell them. And good thing for readers, Vonnegut’s Saab dealership was a complete bust, thanks to the fact that irony doesn’t sell cars and Saab actually had some horrendous repair problems back in the day.
In fact, Vonnegut long blamed the Saab for why he never won a Nobel Prize.
“The Saab then as now was a Swedish car, and I now believe my failure as a dealer so long ago explains what would otherwise remain a deep mystery,” Vonnegut joked. “Why the Swedes have never given me a Nobel Prize for Literature. Old Norwegian proverb: ‘Swedes have short (%*$) but long memories.’”
Bottom line, the Swedes created better watches than automobiles.
“The Saab back then was a far cry from the sleek, powerful, four-stroke Yuppie uniform it is today. It was the wet dream, if you like, of engineers in an airplane factory who had never made a car before.”
Saabs at the time had a design flaw that allowed oil to separate from the gas if left to sit too long.
“I actually blacked out the whole town of Woods Hole at high noon that way, having left a Saab on a parking lot there for about a week. I am told old timers there still wonder out loud about where all that smoke could have come from. I came to speak ill of Swedish engineering, and so diddled myself out of a Nobel Prize.”
Thankfully, Literature and Saab Repair Have Improved
Fortunately, Saabs these days are much better designed, as any Saab mechanic will tell you. Saabs are easy to repair, functional and last a long time. Perhaps if Vonnegut had started today as a Saab dealer, he would be known for great deals on functional cars, not literature’s king of irony.
