Here’s What the Automaker Formerly Known As Saab Was Working on for a Decade
The Emily GT was a 620-mile EV with nearly 500 horsepower and surely someone can start a GoFundMe for this. Anyone?
Saab, or whatever you want to call it now, is quietly expanding its chapter of automotive history to include new sections, subsections, and an appendix. What remains of NEVS—the company leftover from Saab—isn’t much; according to reports, 320 of the 340 remaining employees have been laid off. Parent company Evergrande hit the skids and put NEVS into “hibernation mode,” which doesn’t bode well for NEVS or its future.
But since doing so, we’re now getting a look at what NEVS engineers have been working on for the past decade, and we’re not so sure the Saab story is over yet. The NEVS Emily GT is apparently real and very much for sale, according to the NEVS website. The electric car and its development were recently made public because, according to Swedish auto publication Carup, it could use a new home.
“It is for sale, it is also a joy to be able to show it. It should be allowed to live on, it’s too nice, too good and too modern a car for nothing to come of it. Interested parties are welcome,” Nina Selander, CEO of NEVS, told Carup.
The Emily GT sports a massive 175-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery that offers more than 600 miles of range. Four motors made a combined 484 horsepower with honest-to-goodness torque vectoring, and there was reportedly a high-performance variant in the works, too. That model had 653 hp and a zero-to-60 sprint of about three seconds.
Of course, the Emily GT looks every bit like a successor to the last-gen Saabs, especially the 9-5 sedan, which still looks great if you can spot one on the road. Six Emily GT prototypes reportedly exist, and Evergrande ordered 20 before financial woes forced the company to mothball NEVS and the Emily GT. NEVS recently leased most of its factory to Polestar for research and development there, and the fledgling brand reborn from the ashes of Saab has struggled to find a foothold anywhere, with anyone.
Nonetheless, anyone vaguely familiar with the story of Saab—its mistreatment by mismanagement from other automakers, death, rebirth, death again—knows that what’s next coming from Trollhattan is usually unexpected. The company reportedly worked on 12 different car concepts in 10 years, with the Emily GT being just one. I sincerely hope this isn’t the end of the road for NEVS or Saab, only another page in the company’s unpredictable story.
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