Don't Saab Because It's Over, Smile Because It Happened: Trio Motors (Saab), Burton, Mich. (#4)

Since this blog discusses retail around the Motor City, I'll occasionally write about automotive retail as well. Abandoned car dealerships aren't exactly a common sight, so it's neat seeing one, especially if it has intact signage or something that hints at the cars it once sold. Many I've seen were for brands that still exist, but every once in a while there'll be one from a defunct auto marque. One such dealership caught my eye just after I visited the Dort Mall: an abandoned Saab dealer in the flesh. 

Yeah, it's pretty tiny. (July 2021)

Trio Motors's former home is located at 2501 S Center Road in Burton, Michigan, a suburb of GM's hometown of Flint. It's just north of the intersection with Atherton Road, right near the Burton Meijer store, a mile east of the Dort Mall and two miles south of I-69 and the Courtland Center.

I wondered if I'd ever again see the iconic blue-and-silver Saab sign. (July 2021)

The story I gather from the closure notice and a bit of online research is that this longtime Saab dealer stayed open to service Saabs and sell them used once the brand went bankrupt in 2012. They held out for another six years waiting for Saab to rise from the ashes and once again sell cars in the United States. It seems they weren't able to stay afloat with just Saab service, so they announced their closure at some point in early 2018, and closed on October 1st.

(July 2021)

The minuscule showroom was mostly empty, though inside lay a bit of signage, literature, and even a few wheels and some unsold car care products.

(July 2021)

The service bays sported some old-looking Saab signage, and the doors bore what resembled the chrome trim of a newer 9-3's trunk. Inside there were still some new-in-package Saab wiper blades.

(July 2021)

Oddly enough, there were still three Saabs on property. All of them were first-generation 9-3s: two convertibles parked outside, and a three-door hatchback with its hood left open inside the service bay.

(July 2021)

Seems a bit weird for an abandoned dealership to still have cars. It got weirder when I took a second look at the hatchback.

First: it bore a triangle badge. The mark of a Viggen.

Viggen was Saab's attempt at a performance sub-brand, akin to Cadillac's V models. The name is derived from Saab's 37 Viggen fighter jet, and translates loosely to "thunderbolt" in english. The Viggen name was used only on the first-generation 9-3, and only 4,600 examples were built over four model years.

So there's a pretty rare Saab in here. (P.S.: it appears one of the convertibles also has a Viggen badge.)

A rare Saab bearing a dealer license plate which reads "02" and "20." I'm not too familiar with Michigan's dealer plates, but from what I gather, the date printed on the plate (which has been discontinued as of 2021) is the month and year of expiration, and the plates are issued annually. It would seem that Trio Motors renewed a dealer plate months after they closed up shop.

The dealer plate frame bears the old Saab-Scania logo, as does the car itself. This is a bit strange since Saab-Scania split years before the 9-3 began production. It could be a custom badge. (July 2021)

What's more is that a Google Street View shot from nearly a year after the posted closing date shows quite a few Saabs in Trio's lot, including a couple of 900s, a 9-5 wagon, and what appears to be the same pair of 9-3s I saw in person. A blue second-generation 9-3 convertible was on display in front of the building in this August 2019 image. Other Google Maps photos show that this 9-3 was absent a month prior, and moved to another place on property a month after the Street View image. The blue Saab's movements seem to suggest that even though Trio had officially closed, there was still some Saab-related activity there.

(Google Street View, August 2019)

Since Street View's last pass through Burton, the blinds have been opened. The "building for sale" sign has been taken down, and replaced by another, posted on the Saab sign. Given the different phone numbers, I suspect the building has changed hands in the past year or so.

The Great Lakes Saab Club hosted an event at Trio shortly before closing, where owner Ron Collins invited its members to look around and purchase some of the old Saab parts he'd collected. Saab enthusiast Lee Kelso documented the event in a video, which can be found on YouTube. It was mentioned that the owner planned to donate the building's sign to the Saab Heritage Museum in Sturgis, South Dakota, though obviously it never made the trip.

The dealership was also documented around the time of Saab's bankruptcy. A post on the Saab World forum shows a few pictures from April 2012.

I've come across a few other abandoned dealerships lately. Among them was the long-abandoned Sawyers Pontiac in East Lansing, another relic of a defunct GM brand. Sawyers consisted of two buildings, one of which was recently demolished for new development. The smaller of the two still stands at 1415 Grand River Avenue. 

(April 2021)

The Detroit area is home to an abandoned Toyota dealer in Farmington Hills and an old Jaguar dealership in Novi (coincidentally, they're both also on Grand River Avenue), which I plan to photograph soon and cover in a future post. 

It's nice knowing that this remnant of Saab remains intact, and given the economic state of the Flint area, I doubt the building will be retenanted anytime soon. I hope you enjoyed seeing this little bit of Saab history as much as I did.