Saab pride! Even if you own a Ford or Chevy, you tend to have a sense of pride in the brand, or at least would flat-out refuse to set your left cheek in the driver's seat of your competitor's brand. Therefore, as a Saab owner, I get excited to hear any nifty tidbit of information about the brand, and here's some good news.

With the 9-3 and 9-5 BioPower models being sold in 2006 and 2007, Saab now has a 38 percent market share in the alternative fuel vehicle segment. Last year they sold 11,000 BioPower models, and have sold over 7,000 so far this year in Sweden alone.

Saab is playing a leadership role in promoting E85 and increasing its availability. They have low CO2 emissions across the range, and in fact, according to this video, Richard Hammond ("The Hamster" of Top Gear) says the catalytic converter in the 9-3 is so advanced, that the air coming out of the tailpipe is cleaner than that going in the intake in an urban environment. How about them apples?

[Source: Saab]

Richard Branson is familiar to anyone who follows biofuel news or the hairstyles of millionaires. This week, Saab UK sat down with Mr. Virgin for a talk about biofuels, hydrogen and more. Here are my five favorite bits:

• "I am in the lucky position of owning some profitable transport businesses and I feel it is the right thing to invest those profits over the next 10 years in helping to develop the future for those businesses."
• "[Biofuels] could be a great boost for some African economies."
• "I think biofuel could be 20% of all fuel used in Europe and the US by 2020.
• "I have been looking very hard at the carbon footprint that I produce as an individual and I am currently working on making my home - Necker Island in the Caribbean - which is also a private tourist resort into the first carbon neutral island in the Caribbean. We are in the process of converting entirely from traditional power production there to wind and solar power."
• "There are some businesses that can never be carbon neutral and they shouldn't try to pretend they can be and there are others that can really achieve it. But the solution to the issue of climate change is not simply through planting inappropriate trees in the wrong place. We have to be more scientific about it than that."

You can read the entire piece at the Saab website.

[Source: Saab UK]

Cilck on the photo for a high-res gallery of the BioPower 100

Saab has revealed their new BioPower 100 concept at the Geneva Motor Show today. The concept is based on the 9-5 SportCombi wagon and has a modified version of the 2.0L turbocharged four cylinder from the stock 9-5. The engine has been optimized to run on 100 percent ethanol and take advantage of its higher octane rating compared to regular gasoline. The stock engine is rated at 150hp, but a new engine management system and beefed up internal components has allowed that output to be doubled to 300hp.

Because ethanol only has 60 percent of the energy density of gasoline, most flex-fuel engines typically get less power and efficiency when running on the biofuel. Because the Saab has been optimized for the new fuel, the compression ratio has been bumped from 8.8:1 to 11.0:1 and the maximum boost level has been raised to 17.4psi. The engine wouldn't be able to run on regular gas at these levels without fatal damage, but the ethanol has no problem. Changes to the Trionic engine management system also allow the throttle control and spark timing to be optimized for maximum performance as well. All the things Saab has done, are the same types of things the team at SVS Power has been doing with Vipers, but on a slightly less extreme scale. The press release is after the jump.



[Source: General Motors]

Over at The Auto Channel they've got a video on ethanol as fuel. There's not a lot new here but it does summarize some of what's going on with ethanol around the world. There is a brief history of how Brazil got into ethanol in a big way and also a mention of Sweden. Apparently 85 percent of Saab's 9-5 sales are of the bioPower flex-fuel version.

[Source: The Auto Channel]