‘The ultimate vision for the brand’. This was the simple brief for the Saab Aero X concept car shown at the Geneva motor show in 2006.
Kick off for the project was in January 2005 when Bryan Nesbitt, executive director GM Europe Design, charged the 15 strong GME Advanced design team in Gothenburg to create this “ultimate vision”. Immediately designers were sketching sports cars, not just because when given a free reign this is the default direction car designers take, but because sports cars intrinsically are more expressive and because the sports car “represents the jet fighter of the road” - according to Saab, for whom a tenuous connection with jet fighter production was important.
Two weeks into the project two themes were selected for further development by Nesbitt and project leader and head of Advanced Design at Saab, Anthony Lo; a small sports car and a larger sports coupe design. These were quickly developed using more sketching, tape drawing and one-third scale clay models with the larger design evolving into the front engine supercar theme that was chosen a bare two weeks later to be scanned and milled full size for development into the final design.
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