Northern Composure
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday April 24, 1997
In icy Jamtland in Sweden, minus-10 weather is described as "very pleasant", cars have
electric blankets and spiked tyres, and the skilled locals baulk at nothing. Tony Davis joined them.
The dashboard temperature gauge reads minus 25. The steering is stiff because the rubber bushes are frozen. The suspension is rock hard, the oil in the shock absorbers having been chilled into a frosty, gluggy mass. And the tyres, which are noisily crunching over the ice and snow, have all the give and take of a block of cement.
But the engine is running fine. It should be - it has spent the night plugged into an outlet beside the hotel, giving it an automotive "electric blanket" as the car sat surrounded by more than a metre of soft, powdered snow.
Welcome to Scandinavia and perhaps the most demanding road conditions on earth. Why? The idea was Saab's. Every year Sweden's number two car-maker conducts a program called The Artic Adventure, designed to show just how challenging driving conditions can be at the top of the world - and, presumably, how well Saabs can handle them.
The program is usually conducted within the Arctic Circle but this year's was moved a bit further south. Apart from robbing us of a headline like "Hot Laps Among Cold Lapps", the shift made little practical difference.
The Artic Adventure was still held in the top half of this narrow northern country, in a region where people talk with no sense of irony about "a very pleasant minus 10". Celsius, that is.
On the morning we left to drive our Saabs between Ottsjo and Are, in the mountains of Jamtland, it was a very unpleasant minus 25. At that temperature, the hairs inside your nose freeze within about 20 paces and, even while walking briskly, the cold of the ground works its way through your boots and as many pairs of socks as you can fit in them.
It was only a lack of wind that permitted us to go outside at all. Even then, every local warned us to keep on guard for the white blotches which signal the first sign of frostbite.
The car's mechanical components soon warmed but, before our morning's run was over, the gauge had dropped to minus 32. Cold and mist started sneaking past an otherwise hardy heating system and, in the cryogenics lab that was the great outdoors, our photographer's Canon soon decided that it was too cold to fire.
There is no salt used on the roads up here: it won't de-freeze snow at these temperatures and just makes things more slippery. So the roads remain thickly pasted with ice and compressed snow, a combination so treacherous that extreme caution is advised when merely walking.
Our special adviser, former rally champion Erik Carlsson, estimated that the conditions gave about one-fifteenth as much grip as you would find on normal bitumen.
Not that it seemed to stop him driving more quickly than most people would on normal bitumen. He says things can be a lot more slippery than this.
"The worst time," says Carlsson, "is when the temperature is around zero and you get a little bit of rain landing on snow. I drove up to North Cape [in Norway] about 15 years ago in exactly these conditions and it was the most frightening thing I've ever experienced.
"When we finally parked, the wind actually blew the car around 180 degrees. That's how little grip there was."
On the day that we were driving, the locals seemed to be making no special concessions. Cars whizzed past at what seemed like normal road speeds and even our guide - a Swedish-born, Baghdad-educated, multi-lingual triathalon champion named Charlotte - seemed to have mastered the rally-bred "Scandinavian flick" cornering style through instinct rather than a special interest.
The cars we were driving were examples of the Saab 900 and more upmarket 9000 series. Saab is cele- brating its 50th anniversary as an automobile maker this year, having produced in 1947 its first prototype car - a radical streamlined two-door which looked like a tin cockroach.
Series production of the slightly less extreme 92 model started in 1949. It was a two-cylinder two-stroke, but more conventional four-stroke designs followed from 1967. From the late 1970s, Saab began its long and pioneering love affair with turbocharging.
Today's Saab is an accountant in a loud bowtie rather than a true eccentric. The 900 is built on a rather narrow General Motors platform (GM owns 50 per cent of Saab), while the optional V6 is actually a GM engine. And almost every other car-maker has followed Saab's front-drive lead.
But the body shape of the 900, particularly, is very Saab. To reinforce the corporate heritage, engineers have added oddball features like an ignition key between the front seats, wrap-over headrests and air vents which look like yesterday's idea of tomorrow.
All that apart, Saabs still boast industry-leading safety and - as we found out - an almost magical ability to tackle the planet's most challenging roads.
That Saab can build a car for Sweden's northern territories which feels equally at home in Australia's Northern Territory is an extraordinary achievement. Carlsson - who it must be said is on the Saab payroll (and has been for 42 years) - suggests "if you make a car good on ice, it will be good everywhere".
Interestingly, Saab has never produced an all-wheel-drive model. Its engineers insist that front-wheel drive is safer than 4WD in tricky situations. Even though the total grip is less, the handling is more predictable and the car gives greater warning when it is reaching its limits.
That cars can be driven at all in a Scandinavian winter is due in part to special winter tyres. Our cars were fitted with rows of 2 mm-long steel pins in each tyre. These are particularly effective during braking, when the weight is thrown forward. Acceleration remains hard work. Flatten the throttle suddenly and you can see an indicated 100 km/h when you are still moving forward at walking pace.
On a massive frozen lake, a trio of Saab ice driv-ing experts demonstrated the peculiarities of motoring on what looks and feels like greased glass. With normal road tyres it was almost impossible to change direction at anything above 30 km/h.
On a massive frozen lake, a trio of Saab ice driv-ing experts demonstrated the peculiarities of motoring on what looks and feels like greased glass. With normal road tyres it was almost impossible to change direction at anything above 30 km/h.
And when you have a "lose" on ice it seems to go on forever. During a controlled exercise on normal tyres, I swapped ends four or five times over a distance of 100 metres.
Yet with conventional winter tyres, the car could be coaxed through a series of gentle curves at 60 km/h and on the aggressively studded (4 mm) tyres favoured in extreme conditions, the level of grip was surprising high.
On the open road, 2 mm studs are the longest allowed. Concentration is the big task; nine-tenths is rarely enough. Grip is the most obvious problem; visibility is another. Often the road is misty and lined with snow banks two metres high. With the sun choosing to hover just above the horizon during the brief hours it surfaces, it's very easy to have a total white-out.
If you were to break down, it's not hard to imagine freezing to death within a very short time. Carlsson says this rarely happens because most northerners are well equipped, carrying spare fuel, food and extra clothing. They also tend to pack a snow shovel, chains and a little bag of sand for extra grip if bogged.
The course of action once recommended for those stranded in the cold - to drink alcohol - is no longer recommended. And that's not just because Sweden has a zero alcohol driving limit (something which applies equally to those on snowmobiles).
Fortunately, security is heightened by a form of mobile neighbourhood watch. When we stopped to take photos, other motorists repeatedly slowed to check we were OK.
Petrol is about $1.50 a litre, which isn't exorbitant by European standards. The service station sold a favourite roadside snack: a plastic-wrapped tube called Olkorv, or "beer sausage". More formal restaurant fare includes reindeer, moose, lots of locally grown linganberries and more varieties of cured fish than you can count.
When they are not roasted, smoked or turned into pate, local animals can be a major hazard. Ten motorists died in Sweden last year after colliding with moose; the animal's size and the fact that so much of its bulk sits at windscreen height make it a particularly nasty thing to collide with.
Saab now performs a specially developed crash test with a simulated 400 kg beast. Engineers say if you hit a moose (real or simulated) at 100 km/h, it is the equivalent of having 12 tonnes dropped on the front of your car.
Erik Carlsson advises that when a moose runs onto the road, it helps to turn the car sideways to get more grip. Sometimes he forgets that not everyone is a motorised Viking.
We're frigid bananas
If it's too cold to drive, you can always stay at home and watch the local morning hit, Bananer i Pyjamasar. (No, it doesn't rhyme in the translation either, though B1 and B2 sound a lot more authentic in Swedish.)
Charge it
In Sweden's north, shops have external power points to plug in your engine heater while picking up the groceries. Most car owners have two sets of wheels: alloys for summer, steel wheels with studded tyres for winter.
Droll polar moments
Erik Carlsson, now 68, revolutionised the rally world. He introduced left-foot braking -
hitting the anchors while still using the accelerator to induce oversteer - while other Nordics pioneered the "Scandinavian flick". Erik, married to Pat Moss (the rally-driving sister of Stirling) moved to London "because people should go to the snow. It shouldn't come to them."
Safety thirst
Scandinavian car
buyers demand a strong emphasis on safety. Saab safety expert Christer Nilsson warns people to view independent crash tests with some cynicism - being best in one specific test can be at odds with being good right across the range. "Real world accident surveys are far more important," he says.
buyers demand a strong emphasis on safety. Saab safety expert Christer Nilsson warns people to view independent crash tests with some cynicism - being best in one specific test can be at odds with being good right across the range. "Real world accident surveys are far more important," he says.
Trollhattan transfer
Former Holden marketing director Rob McEniry is now Saab's international head of sales. Saab's HQ is in Trollhattan, a bleak industrial town which dispels any belief that Sweden is one big IKEA
showroom. McEniry commutes for 70
minutes each way from Volvo's home town of Gothenburg.
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald
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