Oh, and did you think they put a 318 under the hood? They didn’t. No, there’s a Slant 6 in there, just like in Aunt Janet’s car. Damn, they all showed up for the infamous Stockholm Syndrome robbery!
Inside, it gets stranger. When building later Valiants, it looks like SAAB installed their own door handles inside, put in a center console, and blessedly added their own donut-hole-headrest seats in place of the Plymouth’s standard fare, which, from my experience, were some of the worst seats that I have ever experienced in a motor vehicle.
Out front, however, things get really bizarre:
What’s with the front end? It looks like a person with their eyelids removed. Apparently headlight wipers and washers became mandatory in Sweden, so to make the A-Body compliant they had to add them. They dealt with the issue of the trim around the lights not clearing the wipers by simply shitcanning the bezels, resulting in this odd, unfinished, creepy look:
Come on, SAAB! You gave us the push/pull broom headlight washer and you do THIS?
I knew that American cars were once popular in Scandinavia, but it’s hard to imagine SAAB executives negotiating for Leaning Tower Of Power-equipped sedans.
Still, it’s nice to see a few poor Valiants getting a chance to break free from their typical life of transporting eighty-year-olds to church at 30MPH. Flying over frost heaves while chasing guys stealing crates of lutefisk and krumkake, these Mopars dealt with abuse even sixteen-year old me couldn’t inflict on them (believe me, I TRIED to kill this thing) yet lived to tell the tale.
sources: wikipedia, Hemmings, The Local, the samba
Once popular? You should go! I see more classic American iron on an average summer day in rural Sweden than I do in California. Especially Corvettes. There are little barn based museums spread out around the countryside with vintage cars, trucks, motorcycles and of course farm equipment. Car shows too.
If you go do be sure to stop at Biltima for fika. Biltima is like a weird cross of AutoZone, Walmart with a cheap food court. Fika is coffee and a cinnamon roll. Last time I was there a few years ago fika cost a whopping 5SEK, or about $0.50. Not a bad price for what is simple IKEA grade food but you go for the people watching. Sweden has its own kind of rednecks and that’s where you’ll see them.
Oh rust isn’t a problem. My cousin and his friends shipped over a trio of ’49 Buicks from Philly with enough rust on them to give even DT eyeball tetnus.
Why? Cuz BUICKS!
You are correct in that I didn’t see many newer American cars save the odd lifted, super sized, 100% ‘ authentic ‘Murican pickup complete with smokestacks. You’d think $8+/gallon would dampen that kind of ridiculous Americanism but no. Some newer Corvettes and a Gulf liveried GT40 in my local ICA’s parking lot too.
(Also ridiculous: Dollar Stores in a country that doesn’t use Dollars.)
So was the factory egg-shaped? Or the employees? I can just image a factory full of Swedish Weebles making cars!
Good game! Anyone else? I suspect it’s kinda region-specific. I’m right on the edge of coal country in the Mid-Atlantic region
HERE–> https://netcareer54.blogspot.com/
Here’s my own 70ies Stockholm Polis vehicle: https://www.instagram.com/p/CiS3keZoXlx/
Amazingly enough my family owned a 2-stroke, 3-cylinder SAAB 96 and a slant-6 Plymouth Valiant back in the 1960’s.
I assure you that the 145 HP slant-6 easily outran the 40 HP SAAB – except in the snow when the SAAB could outrun anything on the road – you just had to build up momentum and never ever touch the brakes.
Pity about the bezels. Ironically at the time, Chrysler offered headlight wipers for its US cars with hidden headlights – the inevitable problem of keeping lenses which never saw a carwash clear.
