The Saab Sonett III was never a mainstream car. Produced between 1970 and 1974, it was Saab’s most focused attempt at a genuine sports car — a two-seat, fiberglass-bodied coupé aimed squarely at the American market, penned by Italian designer Sergio Coggiola, and built in numbers that today make it one of the more collectible Saabs you can find. Just over 8,300 were made across four model years. The world moved on, Saab eventually closed, and the Sonett III became a footnote in automotive history that a certain kind of enthusiast never stopped thinking about.
That kind of enthusiasm has a way of producing interesting things. A recent AI-assisted concept render reimagining the Sonett III as an aggressive, widebody machine has been circulating in Saab communities online – and the reactions have been anything but uniform.
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What Made the Original Sonett III Worth Revisiting
The Sonett name itself has a story. It traces back to a 1955 prototype – an aircraft-influenced, aluminum-chassised roadster racer developed by Rolf Mellde and his small team near Trollhättan on a budget of 75,000 Swedish kronor. The name came from the Swedish phrase Så nätt den är – roughly, “how neat it is” – coined by legendary Saab designer Sixten Sason. Only six examples of that first car were ever built before changing competition rules killed the project before it started.
The Sonett III, arriving in 1970, carried different ambitions. Coggiola’s wedge-shaped body was aerodynamically considered for its era, the retractable headlights – operated manually via a dashboard lever — gave it genuine character, and the front-wheel-drive layout on a platform shared with the Saab 96 made it technically unconventional by the standards of the day. The gearbox, previously column-mounted, moved to the floor. Power came from a Ford Taunus V4, displacing 1.5 liters at launch and later bumped to 1.7 liters as tightening American emissions regulations forced the change.
Around 73 horsepower was the figure. It was never a powerhouse, but the Sonett III was light, compact, and genuinely pretty in the way that Italian-influenced 1970s design often managed to be – purposeful without being overwrought. For a car that Saab built primarily for the US export market, it has retained a surprisingly devoted following on both sides of the Atlantic.
Faithful to the Shape, Aggressive in Execution
The concept comes from Alessandro Menon, an Italian car enthusiast who uses AI tools to explore design ideas and shares his work within the online Saab community. What he has produced here is not a reinvention of the Sonett III — it is more of an amplification. The fastback roofline, the wedge profile, the essential proportions that Coggiola established over fifty years ago are all intact. Menon has been clear about his reasoning: losing the car’s fundamental shape would be its own kind of failure. The lines of a classic, in his view, carry value precisely because of where they come from.
Within those boundaries, however, the treatment is anything but restrained. The bodywork has been substantially widened, with flared arches sitting over large multi-spoke wheels with serious brake hardware visible behind them. A full carbon fiber aero package frames the car front to rear – a wide splitter with vertical dive planes at the nose, aggressive side skirts running the length of the car, and a rear diffuser that suggests the whole thing means business at speed.
The finish is a deep metallic copper-orange paired with dark green racing stripes, a combination that nods to vintage motorsport liveries without tipping into pastiche. The Saab badge appears on both nose and tail, and the “Sonett III” script on the sill leaves no doubt about the car’s identity. The result sits in an interesting space – simultaneously reminiscent of a 1970s period race poster and something that could plausibly appear at a modern enthusiast event without looking out of place.
The Community Reacts
Reactions have followed a familiar pattern for this kind of render. One commenter put the critical case directly: appreciation for a concept that simply resembles the original car is a form of nostalgic conservatism, and that conservatism – combined with poor corporate decisions – played a role in Saab’s eventual collapse. A car like this deserves more than updated graphics on a fifty-year-old silhouette.
Menon’s response was measured. Finding entirely new lines is possible, he acknowledged, but a design that severs itself from its origins loses something that cannot easily be replaced. It is a coherent position, even if it does not resolve the larger debate.
Both views are understandable, and neither is obviously wrong. The tension between honoring what a car was and imagining what it could become shows up any time someone takes on an icon – Saab or otherwise. What the Menon concept does is make that tension visible, and in doing so, it gives the Sonett III a moment of attention it rarely gets outside of dedicated enthusiast circles. For a car produced in fewer than 8,500 units, that is not nothing.
