1958 Saab 93 - Jay Leno's Garage

[Music] it's like a hive of bees coming up so Dov Jay Leno's Garage now this car looks familiar to you because you have a really good memory when we started out Jay Leno's Garage what 12 maybe 13 years ago this is one of the first cars we did at that time we had one little kind of handheld camera and the videos were like two or three minutes long so we thought we'd bring it back again it's one of my more unusual cars but one of my favorites it is a 1958 Saab it has three cylinders it's 750 cc s it's a two-stroke engine which means it has no valves or camshafts or anything like that you have to mix the gas with the or that whole deal original was the three speed we put a 4-speed transmission in it also from a Saab on the car and it's just a lot of fun to drive it's front wheel drive Saab's of course made in Sweden and unique truly a unique automobile they were designed by airplane engineers by jet engineers designed by jets is what they used to say very aerodynamic just wonderful and unusual cars to drive what first got me into these was I had a friend of mine in high school named Fred his mom had one of these we used to take it out and just bomb around in it and it has something called freewheeling now if you don't know what that is is when you engage for you rolling that means when you get off the gas the engine disengages from the transmission and you just roll along and it was such an odd feeling especially being so aerodynamic to go down the street take your foot off the gas and to keep going at the same speed you know usually I have engine braking to slows you down but this she just kind of went along and the engine makes all kinds of popping noises and weird sounds because it's a two-stroke just like a leaf blower or a lawn part and those engines aren't much bigger than this one but it's a full four seater there was a guy named Eric Carlson who used to win all kinds of rallies in these I used to race them on ice and put spikes in the tires he made everybody with these little underpowered sobs in fact I found a comic book I think I bought this comic when I was 12 or 13 and it showed a corvette racing a Saab and the Saab was beating the Corvette and the Corvette was going around the corner and I with a wheel off the ground how you get the wheel off the ground on ice I don't know but well here I loved it so much I had a painting made of that comic book see it's not really possible to lift the wheel when you're on ice but that's okay it's okay it's a comic book anyway I just always loved these Fred and I would go out and just bomb around and you know you just put your foot to the floor and with 750 cc's certainly not the fastest thing around you might beat Volkswagens but it was pretty close but just a lot of fun the gear shift is on the column sobs of cars are one of the first cars to use seatbelts and these were driven mostly by at least when I was a kid college professors and people who wore earth shoes and even people who smoked marijuana they drove Saab there was a certain sort of intellectualism about them especially in New England and he go to Vermont there were tons of these in Vermont because they were good in the snow and every English literature professor in the Vermont College drove one of these they smoked a pipe and you know the whole day I mean there was just something interesting about them and when Saab finally went under was it in 2011 I was sad to see them go they really were a different kind of car company and I'll show you what I'm talking about here very unusual well let's look under the hood let me open this up plus you have suicide doors and you can see okay first off the obvious what was the last time you saw the engined in front of the radiator the fan looks like something came off a desk from the office it looks like an office yes fan little tiny three cylinder engines very funny when you wanted these to heat up you had this shutter inside if you come around here you see that shutter right there you pull the shutter and that shade would come up and block off the radiator and that would allow the engine a get up quicker they gave you an extra quarter oil to carry in here to mix with your gasoline because this was a premix engine by that it was about a ratio of 50 to one put gas a little oil in with the gasoline like a two-stroke engine later motorcycle cars did it automatically you know it had a little metering pump but back in the older you had to sit and measure it out and if they smoked too much you put in too much oil put in too little oil the engine seizes up but that's another story radiators right here to me the most unusual feature of this car well let me go around the other side the generator is also the water pump from here forward it's the generator from the back of the generator it runs the water pump imagine the British trying to combine water and electricity and when you well I just don't think they could do it but these Swedes are very clever people and it works fine it's never leaked it's hilarious it's very funny actually can see for pretty straight forward under here this is your catch tank this is your radiator here this is your heater it's all very simple not much else to tell you battery is right there here's your fuse panel everything is easily accessible here's your coil the heaters are unbelievably things because it's Sweden and it gets cold and they're pretty bulletproof cars there's your twin horns right up here they made a monte carlo model which was the 850 that was a big racing model the horsepower is about 33 horsepower something like that not the fastest thing out there but they get the job done and being a two-stroke can you get on the freeway you just put it in high gear and put your foot on the pedal just keep it to the floor that was your that was sort of your cruise control just the way to your foot and you couldn't over ever think was just run as fast as it couldn't it stay there which is about 75 miles an hour you might get 80 out of it on a good day pretty bulletproof pretty cool cars come on let's take a look at the inside as you can see you've got a suicide door I got this car from a friend of mine named Tom Donny he's a big Saab guy you know that's oh I love about the car hobbies always one guy who knows more about the most obscure models than anybody else and he found this one for me about God 15 years ago Saab across from the first car to have seatbelts everything else is pretty straightforward these were kind of a thinking man's economy car they're really unusual really interesting automobiles to drive as you'll find out in just a minute when you hear it run they make the oddest noise nice solid door crushing gas camp is right here and you have a fairly good-sized trunk and of course you got your two-stroke oil right here you got to carry it because not many places carry two-stroke oil anymore I'm sorry no place carries two-stroke oil anymore so you got to find it and I got all the original books which is kind of cool I'm gonna looked at these in a while there you go this yeah Psalm 93 that's cool I'm not sure how you say that but everything you need to know so I love about these old manuals they tell you everything okay what's the last time you had a car that told you how to take the carburetor apart okay most just have a big sign see your dealer and the nice thing is it's it's Swedish but since they never break you don't really need that what is this it's my license plate still got the Swedish plate on it if you watch the spare parts but that's about it really there it is pretty bulletproof I had this thing a long time and it's very dependable and it runs great you know my friend Tom drove his out from Iowa to visit me and he was driving along the road you know and he ran out of oil or gas something in the engine seized he pulled off the side of the road opened the trunk took out an extra engine head in the trunk stuck it in he was back on the road and under two hours so how many cars can he carry a spare engine in the back in case you break down and just stick the other one in is he you can't those days are gone forever that's what makes you bond with the automobile come on let's take this thing for a ride I believe Saab pioneered these kind of seatbelts see over the shoulder belt yeah yeah Sven we're driving and see a hand wind this clock to start it this way don't kill the battery and drain it just wind it up in the last eight days pull out your choke turn your ignition on and you pull your starting handle put the choke in and continue motoring it's such a fun car to drive wonderful hours a kid in New England when it snows you take these out the woods you just file through the trees with it you know it's falling up it falls off a few stops Plus this phenomena registered in kilometers so it seemed like you going a lot faster okay physical wall you're hitting a hundred that's right am I in one hundred kilometers up like sixty two point five but that's alright my friends we get it stated the four stroke stop come in is a lot of kind of blood the charm was this to the stroke engine just the odd sounds and made and the smell it's just so unusual it's so different nothing sounded like it and as for the muffler you could hear without a oh my god sounds like bb's in a tin can being rattles just the goofiest sound when you grow up in a small town like it you had one of these you had to be very careful because all looks the tough guys in town the guys that had the Camaro's and the GTL is the Mustang if he took this into McDonald's she went through this into the restaurant to get some beat you come back your copy upside down like four or five guys tip it upside down you know the funny thing is most cars the gas sits in a tank for six months or a year it goes bad you can't even drive it might tr3 I didn't drive that for a long time and I thought it would barely go with 30 miles an hour's popping and banging because the Gaza turn to shellac with a juice job when you mix the oil with the gap this guest bothered in there for a couple years they haven't had this out and it runs fine all cars nowadays there's so much the same this is so unlike in the other car as I said before this was originally a three speed car all we did was that a four speed transmission to it which reversed the pattern but it other than that completely stock as I said 33 horsepower stuff like that have a whole lot but it doesn't weigh a whole lot [Music] that was a really big advantage to going to choose Toby does two-stroke engines were cheap to make easy to work on didn't require a whole lot of maintenance really no valves to adjust no oil to change you know you just had to premix you had to mix the gas of the oil but that wasn't that big a problem in fact service stations in Europe sold premix had like regular premium diesel and premix because there are so many two-strokes around and then later what happened was most of the Japanese to his jokes and the sobs as well they put on their own metering device to fill one tank with oil the other tank with gas and they would meet her and automatically so you don't have to sit there try to figure out how much oil to put in because if you put in too much oil in it was smoking that was God's problem they got leader to show Scott ultimately they pollute a lot more than a four-stroke engine that out is precise these guys were great in cold weather they made a lot of heat two strokes are pretty loosely set up so they ran better in cold weather Florida's likely to you know they all thicken up and you couldn't crank it or any that kind of thing there wasn't anyone it just makes such an unusual noise and the freewheeling it still makes me smile like I just don't my foot off the gas and I'm coasting at just about the same speed I was going before you felt doing the aerodynamics and the fact that there's no compression braking you save fuel solves your first introduced in America I think about 1956 this is a 1958 model so at the very beginning and believe me next to a 58 Cadillac of Buick is a weird-looking car and they weren't cheap you know foreign cars were less expensive than a lot of American cars but I think you got a lot more here money with an American car but extremely well made extremely durable good say how do you find a car like this whatever car you're looking for there's a club in that club there's a guy and that guy is got more knowledge about where all the weird stuff is and anybody else and that's the best way to find a car if you looking for 57 Cadillac join the Cadillac Club and there'll always be somebody either retiring or somebody passed away or tired of it or whatever it might be and you're gonna get a car that's been maintained you might pay a little more when you buy a car from a guy that's in the club it's obviously love the car and he spent a lot of time and effort getting is to be at least as good as he could afford it to be so rather than go to a used-car lot or buy it off of Craigslist you know whatever car is shouldn't look that up you know on the internet obviously find out who's the president of the club anybody you know well most of them always have cars for sale join the club if you have to and that's what I do I'm in so many clubs do you want to know my dudes billet this one who looks brand new it's restored to almost a hundred point get paid about eight thousand dollars for something like that but it's dead reliable I've never had to do a thing to it and I got it through a sound guy a guy in a club he wanted to find me the best one he could and I really appreciated that alright see this is proof you don't have to have a McLaren or a Ferrari to have fun this thing as I said just makes me smile there's just terrific and you can still find them pretty reasonably priced I mean they gettin up there especially to get the Monte Carlo that's the big 850 CC model a lot of guys can't handle that one that's got something like 40 horsepower I am that's okay you want to start out with something simple but as you can see it's a lot of fun to try it's different it attracts attention people love it it smells funny environmentalists will chase you it's fantastic see you guys next week [Music]

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 1,112,873

Keywords: jlg, jay leno's garage, Saab Sweden, two-stroke car, ice racing, 50s car, Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, aeroplane, Swedish Air Force, aviation, Jay Leno, Jay Leno's Garage, car reviews, compares cars, classic cars, vintage cars, sports cars, super cars, cars, car gear, McLaren P1, Porsche 918 Spyder, Camaro Z28, jay leno garage, jay lenos garage, car collection, cnbc, episode, motorcycle, ford, corvette, tour, dodge, lexus

Id: RsOkabAYres

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 26 2018