18 Saabs: Inside the Private Collection of Saab Club Nederland’s Chairman

There are Saab collectors, and then there are people for whom the brand quietly becomes a parallel biography. In the Netherlands – a country with a long, unusually loyal relationship with Saab – that line is embodied by Merlijn Kalkman, the current chairman of Saab Club Nederland. When he casually mentioned that his personal collection had grown to eighteen Saabs, it was not said for effect. It was said the way one states a fact that no longer needs defending.

This is not a story about hoarding cars. It is a story about continuity, memory, and the peculiar way Saab ownership evolves when the brand stops being transportation and starts becoming reference material for your own life.

18 Saabs and No Desire to Count Them

A year after Saab Club Nederland celebrated its 65th anniversary, the scale of Merlijn Kalkman’s collection became tangible. Not in a showroom or museum, but in a rented warehouse on an anonymous industrial estate near ’t Gooi. Some Saabs are parked there. Others live under a carport at home. A few are scattered across the country, entrusted to friends and family. This decentralization is telling. These cars are not staged artifacts; they are in circulation, emotionally and physically.

Merlijn arrives at the meeting in a 1967 Saab 96 Monte Carlo, a car whose compact dimensions and rally-bred stance still feel purposeful today. It is not chosen as a statement piece. It is chosen because it feels right. That distinction matters. Among Saab people, the car you arrive in often says more than the one you keep under cover.

What becomes immediately clear is that the number – eighteen – is almost irrelevant. The collection is not driven by a checklist mentality. There is no obsession with color codes, VIN sequences, or owning every engine variant. Instead, each Saab marks a moment: a decision, a transition, or a rediscovered thread from earlier years.

Growing Up Saab, Before It Was a Choice

Merlijn’s relationship with Saab predates his own driver’s license. In the late 1970s, his father – an accountant by profession – bought a rust-brown Saab 99, followed later by a Combi Coupé. The reasoning was typical of Saab buyers of that era: safety, solidity, and a refusal to blend into the automotive mainstream.

Saab, at the time, occupied a very specific social niche in the Netherlands. These were cars for engineers, doctors, architects, and lawyers – people who valued rational engineering but wanted something culturally distinct from German executive sedans. Saab offered seriousness without conformity.

Merlijn absorbed that atmosphere early. Saab was not introduced as a brand with slogans, but as a presence – quietly different, quietly confident. Yet his first car was not a Saab at all. It was his mother’s classic Mini. That detour would end abruptly after a high-speed spin on a wet Belgian motorway, stopping mere centimeters from the guardrail.

That moment recalibrated everything. The conclusion was not philosophical; it was practical. He needed a bigger, safer car. A Saab.

The First Saab, and the Saab Club as a Gateway

Before buying his first Saab, Merlijn did something that would shape the rest of his automotive life: he joined Saab Club Nederland. This was in 1996, still an era of phone calls and paper newsletters. When he registered, the club’s secretary mentioned that her husband had restored several Saab 96s and served on the technical committee.

An invitation followed. Advice turned into exposure. Among the cars shown to him was a green Saab 96, fitted – mercifully, in Merlijn’s view – with the Ford-sourced V4 engine rather than the earlier two-stroke. That car became his first Saab.

This is how Saab ownership often begins: not with a transaction, but with trust. Clubs matter because knowledge matters. And once you have access to both, the barrier between curiosity and commitment disappears.

The 96 quickly revealed its limitations. At 110 km/h, conversation was impossible. Long-distance trips demanded compromise. So Merlijn did what many Saab owners do when they outgrow a model without emotionally leaving it behind: he added another Saab instead of replacing the first.

From Practical Need to Intentional Accumulation

The next step was a Saab 900 Turbo Red Arrow, one of only 120 built. The decision was no longer purely functional. This was a car chosen for its specificity – its rarity, its place in Saab’s turbo narrative. And crucially, the Saab 96 stayed.

Then came a long-standing dream: the Saab Sonett. Found through a magazine advertisement in the pre-internet era, inspected with the help of his father-in-law, a mechanic, the Sonett III became Saab number three. At that point, something shifted.

As Merlijn himself admits, once you pass the point where a car exists solely to take you from A to B, quantity stops being the defining factor. Opportunity becomes the driver. A chance find here, a neglected project there. Eventually, even the origin story of Saab itself enters the equation.

That is how the Saab 92 arrived – two of them, bought from a greenhouse full of abandoned restoration attempts. The plan was pragmatic: two cars to make one good one. The execution was educational. “I’m not a technician,” Merlijn admits, “but you learn by doing.” And with the Saab club as a knowledge network, the learning curve flattened.

At some point, you look around and realize you own eighteen Saabs.

Why Ownership Is Not About Driving Them All

The question always comes: why so many, if you can only drive one at a time? The answer is deeply un-automotive. Merlijn compares it to art collectors or concertgoers. Sometimes, he goes to the warehouse simply to look at a car. To appreciate its proportions. To remember why it entered his life.

This is a crucial insight into Saab culture. Saab ownership is rarely transactional. It is reflective. The cars carry stories, not just mileage. Some owners chase completeness – every color, every engine. Merlijn does not. His ambition is broader and narrower at the same time: one of every Saab type.

There are still gaps. He no longer owns a Saab 93, having sold it when his first child arrived. The regret is immediate and unfiltered. Not about the child, of course – but about the car. Anyone who has sold a Saab at the wrong moment understands that distinction perfectly.

Other models hold less appeal. The Saab 90, for example, leaves him cold. A front borrowed from the 99 and a rear from the 900 may be historically interesting, but emotional attachment is not automatic. Saab enthusiasm is selective, and that selectivity is honest.

The Cars That Matter Most

Ask Merlijn to name his three most cherished Saabs, and the discomfort is obvious. It feels like ranking children. Still, three stand out.

First, the green Saab 96 – the beginning. It was even used as his wedding car. Second, a blue Saab 900 purchased new by his parents in 1987. Not a Turbo, to young Merlijn’s disappointment, but a modestly specified automatic with a sunroof. That car left the family, was sold, and later tracked down through an online appeal. Six months after posting the license plate online, the car resurfaced. The owner, moved by the story, sold it back to Merlijn. This is not luck. This is Saab community gravity.

The third favorite is one of the Sonetts. Perhaps because they are the most unusual. Perhaps because they are simply fun. Interestingly, the Saab 92 does not make the top three. It is historically significant, but dynamically compromised. It doesn’t really drive. It doesn’t really stop. It exists best at exhibition speeds.

Saab as an Identity, Not a Brand

Merlijn’s reflections on Saab’s appeal cut to the core of why the brand still matters. Nobody drives a Saab unconsciously. Every Saab owner made a deliberate choice at some point. These cars invite identification.

He never saw himself in a spoilered BMW, a flashy Mercedes, or a sharp-edged Alfa Romeo. Saab occupied a different psychological space: thoughtful, durable, quietly confident. A Saab engine, as the saying goes, is barely run-in at 200,000 kilometers.

Critics often call Saab boring, mistaking restraint for dullness. But that overlooks the brand’s sporting lineage: rally victories, Erik Carlsson, Stig Blomqvist, turbocharging long before it was fashionable, and chassis tuning that rewarded commitment.

One of the Top Gear presenters once summed it up perfectly: “Saab is as safe as a Volvo, built like a Mercedes, but cooler than a BMW.” It sounds like a throwaway line, but it captures something enduring.

18 Saabs as a Living Archive

Merlijn Kalkman’s collection is not static. It is not curated for resale value or concours trophies. It is a living archive of Saab thinking, spread across decades, body styles, and engineering philosophies. Each car is present because it answered a question at a particular moment in his life.

In that sense, the number eighteen is not impressive. What is impressive is the coherence behind it. The absence of excess for its own sake. The presence of intention.

In a world where Saab exists only in memory and metal, people like Merlijn ensure that the brand remains dynamic rather than nostalgic. Not preserved behind ropes, but driven, discussed, repaired, and sometimes simply looked at in silence. And if that results in eighteen Saabs along the way, so be it – a story that first surfaced in the Dutch automotive press through AutoReview’s in-depth profile of the Saab Club Nederland chairman, before finding a broader international audience here.