South Korea keeps surprising us. We’ve written before about the vibrant Saab community that gathered at the HLUT exhibition in Seoul – an event that showed, beyond any doubt, that the Swedish brand has found devoted followers far from Trollhättan. Now another Saab story from Korea adds a deeply personal dimension to that picture.
Jang Jin-taek is one of South Korea’s most respected automotive journalists and the founder of Media Auto, a YouTube channel followed by hundreds of thousands of Korean car enthusiasts. A former Kia Motors designer turned writer and broadcaster, he is known for his meticulous attention to build quality, his designer’s eye, and an almost stubborn refusal to soften criticism when a car deserves it. In July 2019, he uploaded something different – a video simply titled: “Let me introduce my car. Saab 9-3 Convertible, 2003.”
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The Car Itself
The Saab in question is a first-generation 9-3 Convertible, a 2003 model – 17 years old at the time of filming, with just 65,000 kilometers on the clock. Jang Jin-taek had bought it used in 2017 and been caring for it personally ever since. In the video, he walks his viewers through his weekly maintenance ritual: checking underneath for oil leaks, listening for unusual sounds, examining exhaust gases with his bare hand to feel for any contamination. For a 17-year-old imported car in Seoul, this level of devotion speaks volumes.
The soft top, he notes with a smile, was partly the reason he chose a convertible over a hardtop. He has cats at home – and cats, as any Saab owner with a soft top will know, have a habit of leaving their mark. The fabric roof, he reasoned, at least gives them somewhere to sit without scratching.
A Designer Who Understood Saab
What makes this video stand out from a typical used-car review is the depth with which Jang Jin-taek discusses Saab’s engineering and philosophy. This is not a man reading from a press release. He speaks as a former automotive designer who has spent his career thinking about why cars are built the way they are.
He explains how Saab’s aircraft heritage shaped everything – the aviation-inspired griffin emblem, the rear spoiler conceived as an inverted wing to counter lift at speed, the rounded headlamp wipers introduced in the 1970s for Nordic winter visibility. He talks about the safety innovations Saab pioneered before almost anyone else: the belt pretensioner, the traction control system developed for icy Scandinavian roads, the padded interior surfaces designed to protect occupants from injury during a collision.
On the larger question of what Saab was and why it mattered, he is remarkably lucid. He describes a moment in automotive history when Saab could genuinely compete with Mercedes-Benz and BMW – when doctors and lawyers in America were choosing the Swedish car over German alternatives because it combined turbocharged performance with genuine safety thinking.
Then came GM. He recounts, with visible frustration, how General Motors handed Saab an Opel platform and told them to build on it – and how Saab’s engineers, characteristically, changed virtually everything anyway, including the wheelbase. GM’s response, he says, was to remove the people who pushed back. The rest is a history we all know too well.
“Saab used to make cars with stubborn conviction,” he says. “They always believed they were right – and because of that, they pioneered so many world firsts. Most companies wait to see what others do first. Saab never did.”
Jang Jin-taek offers a theory about why Saab has been gaining renewed attention in recent years, even as a brand that no longer exists. He connects it to the broader success of Volvo and the growing global appreciation for Scandinavian design sensibility – clean, functional, honest. The cold Nordic climate, he suggests, shaped not just the engineering of these cars but the mindset behind them: a culture that took family safety seriously because long winters kept people close to home and made the consequences of road accidents feel deeply personal.
It is the kind of analysis you rarely hear in a car review. But then, Jang Jin-taek is not a typical reviewer.
From Seoul, With Respect
The video was filmed for Car TV, a Korean automotive cable channel, and uploaded to his personal YouTube channel where it has been viewed over 81,000 times. The comments from Korean viewers reflect genuine curiosity and affection for the car – and more than a few people discovering Saab for the first time through his presentation.
He ends the video with characteristic modesty. He won’t be pushing the car hard or showing off lap times, he says. The 9-3 is too precious to him for that. He just wanted to show people that it exists, that it runs well, that it is properly maintained – and that a Swedish car built over two decades ago still has things to teach anyone willing to pay attention.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
Previously on SaabPlanet: Unveiling South Korea’s Saab Enthusiasts – “From Extinction to Immortality”
