Entrusting the Saab brand to General Motors has been a disaster. Instead of protecting the proprietary features that define Saab, GM has shared brand differentiators with competitive GM brands and even now intends to sell Saab technologies to Beijing Automotive Industry Holdings Co. Ltd.

Not only has GM made no apparent effort to understand the essence of Saab and what revs the Saab buyer, they have also imposed the endless GM design vetting process (a.k.a. an innovation-killing time machine) on Saab’s idiosyncratic aesthetic. The results have been disastrous.

This is especially sad to the small and, yes, quirky segment of drivers who mourn the killing of Saab. These are not the “car guys” who have welcomed the resurrection of the Mustang and Charger. And they’re not the drivers of generic Toyotas and Hondas.

For many years, Saab held the unique position of the quirky car for intelligent drivers (or, better said, the intelligent car for quirky drivers). Like the Karmann Ghia or Citroen, Saab has never yearned to be the status symbol that a BMW or Mercedes is. One of a kind, created by the Swedish air-force design team, it was for owners that were involved with their cars at a level deeper than the mere cosmetic. It conferred a status more cerebral than temporal.

My colleague Ben’s dad was an early serial-Saab aficionado. He bought three in the '60s alone, each more refined than the last, but all quintessential Saabs. He is one of the stalwarts who, in return for the Saab experience, measured and poured their own mixture of oil and gas into three-cylinder, two-stroke, smoky engines that rumbled like gravel in a metal bucket. He raced his first Saab 93 on the frozen lakes of New Hampshire and profited from its rare front-wheel drivetrain. In later years he graduated to a '95 wagon (with a more civil four-stroke engine) and later the Sonnet sports car. As Saab brand values were compromised over the past 15 years, he’s reluctantly abandoned the brand.

Born in Scandinavia, it is no wonder that the further north one ventures, the more Saabs one sees on the road. More than 20 years ago I cruised over countless Vermont back roads in my own first car, a silver-blue 1986 Saab 900 Turbo and felt part of a small community of mountain-loving individualists. The car accelerated deliberately from a standing start, but as it hit third gear the turbo charger engaged, slamming me back in the cockpit. Tight in the steering, it swooped through mountain curves and never faltered in the Vermont snow.

The aviation engineers at Saab had a very different way of thinking about cars. Their early designs were an antidote for the bourgeois design sensibility propagated by the Detroit marketing machine. And the latest concept cars, stalled in Swedish design studios, show a contemporary evolution of that singular aesthetic.