Why Does Saab Have a Griffin on Its Logo?

Saab is an acronym of Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, the Swedish Aeroplane Corporation, created in 1937 in Linköping to build aircraft for the Swedish Air Force. Cars came after the war. The first Saab company mark in our archive shows SAAB in spaced capitals under a front view of a twin-engine plane with two propellers, and the car badges kept the idea. A 1963 mark has tall, narrow capitals curving over a small twin-engine aircraft, and the same design appears as a chrome emblem on Saab Sonett cars of the 1960s.

No griffin yet. For the first two decades of Saab cars, the badge was about flying.

A team led by engineer Gunnar Ljungström and designer Sixten Sason built the first prototype, the Ursaab, which was shown to the press on 10 June 1947. The production Saab 92 followed in December 1949 and car assembly moved to Trollhättan in 1948. The archive dates a rounded blue square with tall light-blue SAAB letters to 1949, the year the 92 entered production.

The griffin was not on those cars. It arrived with a merger.

Scania's logo shows a griffin from the coat of arms of the province of Scania, according to the Wikipedia article on the company. A griffin has the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The Malmö bicycle maker that became Scania used a griffin's head on a three-spoke chainset, and after the 1911 merger with Vabis the combined company kept the emblem. In 1969 Saab merged with Scania-Vabis to form Saab-Scania. The archive shows a dark blue Saab-Scania roundel with the crowned griffin by 1974.

That is the whole story, and it is a business one. The sources used here do not say that anyone chose the griffin for what it means to Saab, and the company has not published an official meaning for the navy, red and gold.

Saab-Scania was split in 1995. The roundel dropped the name SCANIA and kept the crowned red griffin above a heavy SAAB wordmark on a navy disc, the best-known Saab car badge. General Motors owned Saab Automobile from 2000 and sold it to Spyker Cars in 2010. Production stopped in 2011, and the company went bankrupt in December that year.

The griffin then caused one more problem. In August 2012, according to Wikipedia, Scania said the griffin logo used in both its own and Saab Automobile's trademark would not be allowed on future Saab cars under the owner NEVS. Scania was reported to believe the emblem was of high value in China, and to fear it could end up in the wrong hands through the Chinese interests behind NEVS. The name on cars ended in 2014.