Saab Director Praveen batish

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“Sydney is… a very fickle market. It very much goes with the newest, the trends, and so on. But I think our customers have a little bit of unrest in terms of the dealer network over the last few years, and that doesn’t help because they don’t feel as confident.“Premium customers like to see familiar faces, they like to feel as though they’re important et cetera, which is quite right, really. Unfortunately, when you have a change of hands, it takes a bit of time for staff to understand the different customers.“When you’re used to selling a volume brand and all of a sudden you’re dealing with a premium brand, in terms of customers it’s a different feel. The time it takes for a premium customer to make a decision in terms of buying a car is that much longer. They’re not instantly turned on by whatever is being advertised as far as a tactical message is concerned.”Mr Batish said he believed sales would pick up in the second half of this year – “we’re hoping to be at least on a similar level to where we were last year” – and that Saab, on an international level, remained secure as a brand of General Motors.“I think Saab is very secure. If you look at the new product we showed in Detroit and in Geneva, you can see that there is investment in future products. And at the end of the day, future products is the lifeline of any brand,” he said.“For Saab, we’ve had the 9-5 for too long. And with the 9-3 you could argue that 90 per cent of the bodywork was changed, but we’ve had that probably longer than most people (competitors) would do in their cycle. And also, at the moment we don’t have the proliferation of products in terms of the range that our competitors do.”Saab will get AWD variants into its regular 9-3 range later this year, while the long-overdue new-generation 9-5 sedan has been pushed back to next year.The 9-4X SUV was shown at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit in January (with a 221kW/400Nm version of the 2.0-litre BioPower engine), while the 9-X BioHybrid unveiled at the Geneva motor show in March was the first official look at the forthcoming 9-1 compact car. An all-new 9-3 is also overdue.