Nothing's as bone chilling as a cop car coming up on you in the rearview. A harsh grille, spotlights and flashers hanging off of it like a cowboy's gun belt. Bull bars in case it needs to shove you out of the way, hurrying to protect and to serve.
There was a time when the big three competed just for your monthly payment but for the giants wads of cash cops spend on their cars. I've owned a cop car - an '89 Chevy Caprice. The radiator was twice as thick as the civilian Caprice I'd owned before. It had a transmission cooler, an oil cooler, beefed up suspension and 5.7 liters of law enforcing thunder. That a picture of it right here.
Then the caprice went away, replaced with the Tahoe. How'd that work out? Dodge / Plymouth had stopped selling cop cars back in the 80s and cops, feds and narcs were left with the
cop-killing Crown Victoria.
Chevy made a half-assed pass at cop cars with the front-wheel drive Impala. And it was sad. New York cops use these cause they're cheaper and they don't get into chases.
But hey, now, the other guys are coming back to take the Crown Victoria's....crown. Dodge Chargers have taken over a number of places - by far the meanest, most Judge Dredd-looking cop car on the road. Chevy has announced they'll once again start making the best car ever made: the Caprice. And hey, it makes sense that GM makes cars for the government. The tickets you get from it will literally help pay for making it. You wanna think the cops won't have to pay too much to buy cars from the government. Ponder that.
But hey, even though the key was in a fun place, Saabs always lacked a lifestyle to buy into, an aspirational element, an image. If I'm a young urban professional, I'll have a silver BMW. If I want a powerful, wild-man car, I'll pay the roughly 30K for a Mustang GT Convertible.Outdoorsy fun? Nissan Xterra. I'm boring and responsible: Lexus. For all the cars that could be had in Saab's price-range, all of them told the world just where you were at. 'I've got about 30 grand to spend on a car. My student life days are long behind me.'
The Saab never worked hard to establish who was supposed to buy one. OK, so we know Architects liked them and so did Seinfeld. Who else? People who liked grandma glasses around their $30 / £20K station wagon's headlights? At best, the newer Saabs look like 5-Series knockoffs. Just like Chevrolet, they lost their way and started looking like they were designed by committee - beige. So, sadly, we now loose another, if even slightly, unique car brand. But, just like Plymouth, Oldsmobile and Rover. We lost Saab long before its official death. 
