Saab Automobile has been a separate company from the also-Swedish aerospace and defense firm Saab for a while now. In particular, it’s been an unprofitable division of General Motors. And GM, as part of its bankruptcy and reorganization, is selling its satellite subsidiaries. So now Saab, via a $600 million loan guarantee by the Swedish government, will be owned by a company called Koenigsegg Automotive that has 45 employees and “turns out just a few ‘super cars’ — high-performance sports cars costing more than $1 million each — a year.”
Allegedly this will save 3,000 jobs which makes it appealing to the Swedish government. But the trouble with all these auto bailouts keeps being not so much that they don’t make sense individually as that they don’t make sense collectively. The world has too much capacity to build cars, and that’s making it impossible for automakers to make money. But nobody wants their auto industry to suffer the job losses. So the overcapacity keeps not getting resolved.
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