The emergency refresh is something automakers never want to do. Sometimes, like with the 2013 Honda Civic, it’s to upgrade a model that feels otherwise a bit cheap. However, occasionally, styling is just a little too bold for consumers. These days, if you walk into a Subaru dealership looking for a perfectly inoffensive three-row crossover, the Ascent fits that bill perfectly. Hell, Subaru’s offered reasonably anonymous seven-seat crossovers for 16 years, but it wasn’t always that way. When the 2006 Subaru B9 Tribeca launched, it was, um, polarizing.
The B9 Tribeca was Subaru’s first shot at a three-row crossover for the U.S. market. Powered initially by a three-liter EZ30 flat-six engine and spinning all four wheels through a five-speed automatic, this new-for-’06 crossover was meant to compete with models like the Toyota Highlander and Honda Pilot in the burgeoning three-row crossover arena. Unfortunately, in such a conservative segment, safe styling sells, and Subaru did anything but play it safe.
For instance, Jalopnik called the B9 Tribeca’s face the “flying-vagina front end,” and SFGate called the crossover “go-through-anything-but-ugly.” If you think that’s mean, The Truth About Cars wrote:
Without any prompting whatsoever, my 11-year-old daughter took one look at the new Subaru B9 Tribeca and said ‘ew’. And there you have it. Scooby’s first-ever SUV is an irredeemably gruesome beast whose design should have been aborted a femtosecond after conception.
Holy shit, they absolutely bodied this thing. Yeah, the grille of the 2006 Impreza just didn’t scale up to three-row crossover proportions well, and Subaru needed to fix it, fast.
Emergency facelifts take time and cost tons of money, so for a relatively small company like Subaru to change not just injection-molded plastic parts, but stampings and incredibly expensive lighting assemblies after just two years, it just makes you wonder how they did it. Well, it turns out that for the 2008 model year, Subaru might have copied homework that Saab never turned in. Let me explain.
Back in the mid-aughts, GM had a stake in what was then known as Fuji Heavy Industries, and set about disguising a few Subaru models as its own cooking. First came the hastily rebadged Chevrolet Forester for the Indian market:
But most North Americans are more familiar with the Saab 9-2x:
Known affectionately as the Saabaru, it was a slightly tweaked Subaru Impreza sold through Saab showrooms, and it wasn’t the only Saab-Subaru tie-up planned.
See, in the mid-aughts, crossovers were also taking off, and GM was planning on tweaking the Subaru B9 Tribeca into a three-row Saab crossover called the 9-6x, pictured above and below. Oh, and on the outside, these tweaks were extensive. We’re talking about a new hood, new bumpers, new front fenders, new headlights, new grillework, a new hatch, and new taillights — big changes that ensured the 9-6x wouldn’t look much like the controversial B9 Tribeca.
However, in October 2005, the New York Times reported that General Motors sold 8.7 percent of its 20.1 percent stake in Fuji Heavy Industries to Toyota. GM would later go on to sell its entire stock, cutting ties with Subaru and ensuring the 9-6x would never see a Saab showroom. A prototype would survive, eventually being inducted into the Saab museum, but that was the end of the line for the 9-6x. Or was it?
Looking at the facelifted 2008 Subaru Tribeca, it bears more than a passing resemblance to the abandoned 9-6x. The taillights are identical, the liftgate stamping is quite similar, even the headlights look similar to the ones on the Saab, just with the black inserts painted silver. While certainly not identical to the 9-6x, the 2008 Tribeca shares more than a passing resemblance.
Was much of the 2008 Tribeca’s alterations different to those of the 9-6x? Sure. The hood, front bumper, and all the front bumper trim pieces are obviously different, and even the liftgate was slightly different due to an oval recess for a badge versus a round one. However, it’s not impossible to imagine that Subaru managed to cook up an emergency facelift for the B9 Tribeca so quickly because half of the homework was already done. What do you think?
(Photo credits: Subaru, Saab Museum)
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The OG B9 still looks better than most of the current BMW designs. Also at least its interior feels like it fits with the exterior. Meanwhile Isuzu had the Axiom which I loved as a kid and still like. But then you look inside and it’s such mid 90’s phones in garbage. That all said. I still would love to find a decent shape Axiom
It’s as pretty as any of them, it just needs a nose job.
-The K-Man.
I actually thought these were cool and futuristic back in the day. Of course, I was a literal child, and I thought the new Hawkeye WRX was the most badass vehicle in existence, nose and all.
I didn’t even realize the face lifted Tribeca existed. Wow, what an anonymous piece of bankruptcy-era GM mediocrity.
In all honesty, I think Subaru missed the boat by chickening out of their attempt at a unifying corporate grill. Yeah the OG Tribeca was divisive, but they could have refined it, and figured it out. It’s hardly offensive by modern standards.
To this day, Subaru’s styling has felt very lost- Basically just contemporary Toyota Truck styling applied to cars.
Sure, when these were new I thought they had a face like a twisted shit can. But nearly 2 decades on, they don’t look that egregious to me. I think I’ve been desensitised by 18 years of increasingly vulgar designs.
I see cars now, like the AU Ford Falcon, which in the late 90’s was panned for its controversial “New Edge” styling that looked like both ends had melted and drooped down. I now think, “meh, it’s a fairly conservative sedan.” I see the also vaguely vulva like grille of the early 2000’s Jaguar S Type, “I suppose that’s fairly tasteful,” I mutter to myself. Car design has become so deranged that abominations like the Tribeca are almost aging gracefully.
Agreed. Even objectively ugly vehicles like the Pontiac Aztec seem inoffensive amongst current abominations like the Hyundai Kona, Toyota Prius, CHR etc from a few years past.
The CHR would have to be one of the worst current offenders!
Anyone know what the…Aston? is in the background of the show room?
That is SAAB Aero-X concept car.
Thanks! I completely forgot that existed. To be honest, I never cared for it that much…had no restraint compared to their prior design, very Batman-villian-esque styling with the front wheel arches, but not in a good way. Felt like it lost all of the charm of the old rounded front ends, even with the less quirky early GM years. Rear end was great though.
The funny thing about the Tribeca is the emergency face-lift just made it more obvious that the whole car was ugly and the grille was taking all of the heat. It’s like they traced a contemporary Highlander but screwed up every line in the process.
Yes, if the rest of the original design matched the grill it would have been more successful. By that I mean I might have bought one, but from the side it looks like some cheap Chevy truck thing. Totally anonymous from the side.
In NYC you only ever see your car from the side if you park on the street.
The first Tribeca was hideous. The second version was so boring it probably caused its drivers to fall asleep at the wheel.
The original B9 Tribeca was a direct descendant of the 1958 Edsel line. Change my mind.
-which was inspired by the 1955 SAAB. There, full circle 😉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_93
I didn’t think the OG Tribeca was ugly, just a little weird. It looked like it had a bloated upside down Alfa Romeo shield and whiskers grille slapped onto it. The restyling made it utterly forgettable.
Yeah, at least it was distinctive. The facelift was just meh.
Andreas Zapatinas, Alfa Romeo’s designer moved from AR to Subaru about that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Zapatinas
A bit like Peter Schreyer moved from Audi to Kia. Makes you wonder how much is it is the designer’s personal style vs corporate.
From the very wiki page that you linked:
From the wiki article that you linked:
I wonder if the 9-6x would have helped Saab or just diluted the brand more. It’s incredibly unimaginative and the later 9-4x looks much, much better.
It’s possible that it would’ve done both. A crossover at that point could very well mean a much needed cash infusion, but this crossover would surely look too much like a non-Saab for brand afficionados. As someone who likes Saab without being a purist, I wouldn’t have minded that they’d released a brand-diluting crossover, if that meant the company had been saved. It’s truly a shame that such a special brand was left for death.
I always hoped the swedish government would intervene, as other countries did when flagship automakers were failing: Renault was state owned from 1945 to 1996; the brand’s golden period from the early 60s to the late 80s is pretty much a product of state ownership.
Yes. And also never understood why nobody really tried to save SAAB.
Although I freely admit to no knowledge of their financial situation, it really bothered me when SAAB stopped being an independent manufacturer.
They were one of the safest cars you could buy before crash safety was a thing.
As a kid our family owned a lot of the very early models, and a Sonett. And they were bullet proof, except for the rust factor.
Have often wondered what they would be producing now had they survived.
I’ve always felt like Saab was likely used by GM to offload debt/other shady dealings protecting the parent company’s finances. As an automaker, Saab was too small to have accumulated unsavageable losses on its own in my opinion. But a small automaker belonging to a huge conglomerate headed towards bankruptcy and desperate for a bail-out? They were primed to be used as a financial bumper during that crisis.
Great point.
You’re possibly right, but saab was also good at hemorrhaging money on its own. Lots of R&D (good), but low sales (bad).
Ford learned the hard way how much European brands can cost to own and maintain. Notice how many they still own (0). Though by the same token the PAG era has some of my favorite Aston Martins, Jaguars, Land Rovers, and Volvos.
All that said, saab did have a bit of a culture problem, especially with R&D and such. I think one of the more telling examples (and I haven’t found the source I read years ago, but also didn’t look very hard) was when GM gave them the GM2900 and Epsilon platforms for the two produced generations of 9-3 that they made so many changes to the cars to make them meet saab’s self-imposed requirements that the products were delayed and cost overruns were obscene.
Similar reports indicate the same happened to the 9-5, especially the Epsilon II platform it had. I believe they even went so far as to change crash structures and the shape of the A-pillars compared to its other gm brethren, but that could have been the 9-3 (or both).
See my reply to Do You Have a Moment…. I also liked Saab and wish there were still a somewhat mainstream company doing smart-odd things and going their own way rather than endless blandness and doing established things differently just because they’re different, certainly not because they’re better.
Spyker sort-of tried to keep them going.
The name is still around, I think it’s owned by some Chinese conglomerate now, automobile-wise. The plane side is still doing some stuff, if memory serves.
I agree, it could have been both. I have a 9-5NG and love it. I also don’t really think GM is the reason Saab failed — I think it was probably inevitable. But I do think this is, in a lot of ways, worse than the 9-7x, which at least had a unique interior to go with the fascia swaps. I’ve seen the interior for this and it’s exactly the same as the Tribeca. The 9-7x and 9-2x were cynical efforts but at least they weren’t boring.
You know, I’m not so easy on GM in that debalce. Saab was such a small company, it’s hard to understand how it became such an unsalvageable money pit. I always felt like Saab was a victim of GM accounting leading up to the 2008 crisis. Only that explains why everyone who looked into buying the brand at the time immediately gave up on the deal once they looked into the company’s finances.
A big problem was positioning and, while their niche was where they survived quite well for a time, it was also what inevitably killed them, like a highly specialized species who perfectly occupies a niche until climate change, plate tectonics, whatever happens and it disappears. They weren’t cheap cars to make, but not high enough status to charge a lot more (like the overrated junk from Germany) at the numbers they could sell within that niche and they were too odd to sell in enough numbers for economies of scale to have a major effect (and possibly would have required building somewhere cheaper). This also stunted development of newer models and tech as the rate of industry change was starting to increase, which would very likely have killed them off, except GM picked them up. That nobody else really wanted them is telling about the business case—GM didn’t kill them, they kept them alive on life support. When GM dumped them, who were about the only interested parties? Koenigsegg, but that fell through for whatever reason. In stepped Spyker(!), who then tried to get the Chinese to buy in (I suspect their original goal, perhaps also for their own survival, with a mainstream-ish brand like Saab making them more attractive to the Chinese), and even they didn’t really want it (easy enough stealing IP from more advanced mass market OEMs).
Thanks. Good points. My problem is we owned so many (but none newer than a 1970), and the memories of how fun it was to ride with my Dad never went away.
He drove them like he was in a damn rally 90% of the time. I still recall us getting air over the railroad crossings in Minnesota, and Colorado. He’d hit some of them at 45-50 mph and we would be airborne for close to 100 feet. Crazy bastard.
My old man was a cop, as such he got away with a ton of crap…
The business end of the failed co. is something I should research more.
But it depresses me to do so. But do recall that they had gotten pretty expensive during the 1980s and on. Gracias…
The pre-GM 900 was still my favorite interior. Everything just seemed so perfectly placed, comfortable, and well made and I liked the way it seemed to wrap around me. The way the hood opened was cool, too, and I always liked the Sonnets.
Our Sonnet was my favorite. But I recall that when it was about a year old my brother stood on the hood to replace an overhead light in the garage door opener. And spider cracked the entire front clip into a huge mess. Didn’t crack the fiberglass, just the paint. My Mom was really pissed at him buying the Sonett. It was brand new, and he traded a 1 year old Mercedes in on it. We had 5 kids, and she about lost it over him buying a 2 seat car. The divorce came 2 years later.
Good times.
The old man had a major shit fit over that deal. My brother just said “maybe you should buy a friggin’ ladder Dad.”
I had a schoolmate who rolled two of his old 99s off a mountain in Colorado. He walked away both times without a scratch. One rolled almost 300 feet down the mountain side.
More good times…
Happy Easter.
I think the government involvement was why Spyker got involved for as briefly as they did.
Are we really going to call any old cars ugly when BMW is allowed to sell… whatever it is they are selling?
Just because something else is uglier doesn’t mean something isn’t ugly.
the interior was amazing for its time. That dash and center consul swoop was like being in a spaceship. I love these things.
Likely minority point of view, but I really liked the styling of the B9 Tribeca over the facelift. The facelift brought the big engine upgrade, ability to run on regular, and upgraded transmission though.
Certainly the case. Even the tailgate was probably an easy change – I would guess (not being a stamping expert) that the badge was the last shot that it got in the dies, or was done with an insert in the die that could easily be replaced with another one.
I feel as though if you’re going to call something a “flying vagina” you should probably have seen at least one vagina first.
I have personally never seen a flying vagina however geese fly in a V formation so there is that…
Yeah you can say all kind of things about the pre-facelift Tribeca’s front end, but I never got how anyone was seeing that. If anything it has kind of a fish mouth going on. Sadly Lexus liked that idea so much that they blew it up and turned it into the entire grill for most of their lineup.
I own a 07 tribeca. It’s visage is ‘unique’ but it drives and handles well, is comfortable and reliable. The interior is several steps above the vehicles I cross shopped it with the Lexus RX350, Toyota Highlander and Cadillac SRX. It gets the expected fuel economy for an awd and has never cost more than a hundred or so per year for service. I dont find the look any worse than many of the overwrought designs of the last decade.
I see the twin to my old Sonnet there, but what is that white car?
Concept cars: Saab Aero-X (saabplanet.com)
My MIL had one of these things, I didn’t think it was really that bad!
I wasn’t put off by the looks. It was the atrocious gas milage on primo that stopped me from a purchase.SAAB just made it look like a SAAB, same as the 9-7x.
Haven’t we all occasionally faced the dilemma of what to do with leftovers? Seems a shame to let them go to waste. If Subaru did cadge design cues from the abandoned Saab, they should’ve done so before mold started growing on them.
Dark era of American auto manufacturers having absolutely no idea what to do with their acquired Euro brands . . . GM w/Saab and Ford w/Jaguar and Volvo.
A crossover from a brand that cut its teeth by appealing to outdoorsy types, named after an area of NYC (and trying to sneak in some “benign” wordplay with the B9), borrowing cues from a smaller car without making the connection that it’s a modern take (if unintended) on the original Edsel. It was doomed to fail, and the facelifte didn’t do it any favors other than catapulting it from “horrifying” to “invisibly bland”.
In reality, Subaru’s styling has gone ever downhill from there (it was already on a downwards slope from their arguable apex of the “Bugeye” Impreza and BL Legacy era, so I guess ~2003?). Their latest crop of rubbish is awkwardly ugly and almost deliberately complex and visually offensive for the sake of being different. Adding orange or red accents don’t make the cars less hideous.
Call me weird, but I saw one the other day in a parking lot and thought it doesn’t look too bad these days. Headlights on the one I saw could use a polish though.
It was always the name that really got me…disjointed mouthful names are rarely a good idea, and why name a rugged SUV (this was ’06 remember, most of them were going for that still) after a neighborhood in Manhattan?
The face was ugly, but I found the name benine.
For the money crowd that doesn’t 4 wheel. All sizzle no steak, all hat no cattle.
‘Cause what you see you might not get
And we can bet, so don’t you get souped yet
You’re scheming on a thing that’s a mirage
I’m trying to tell you now, it’s Saabotage