The Rarest Saab You’ve Never Heard Of Is This Electric Mail Truck That Never Made A Delivery

The 1970s were a turning point in automotive history. Multiple oil crises and a rough economy made gas-guzzling cars too expensive for many to run. Several companies went on journeys to find greener futures. One of those companies was Saab, which envisioned mail carriers completing their deliveries without burning a single gallon of fuel. In the mid-1970s it built the Elbil. While this electric mail truck had the right ideas on paper, it would disappear without making a single actual delivery, and reportedly, Saab the car company didn’t even want it.

So much of automotive history can trace its history back to the tumultuous 1970s. An oil crisis fueled by OPEC’s embargo of countries supporting Israel helped lead to the demise of the land yacht and the rise of the fuel sipper. Tie-dye was out, while disco, fuel economy, lower emissions, and downsizing were all in. Import brands became household names, America became a bit more concerned about safety, and the automotive industry entered into the controversial period known as the Malaise Era.

The Oil Crisis of 1973 sent consumers and corporations around the globe into a frenzy as they searched for an alternative to oil. For many, the answer was in one of the earliest automotive technologies: electric propulsion. Magazines published EV plans for do-it-yourselfers while the Sebring-Vanguard CitiCar was a real production EV. And don’t forget about the Electrek Uncar, which, hilariously, was so low budget it used a cheap hair dryer as a window defroster.

Tale Of Two Trucks

The Swedes were also into their own electrification projects. Volvo made a gloriously boxy EV in 1976 and Saab? It wanted to change mail delivery.

According to Autoblog, Saab envisioned a future where Sweden’s postal service could deliver the mail out of trucks that would drive at low speeds up to 40 miles at a time. The project began in the early 1970s, but as a twist, this wasn’t a project taken on by Saab the automaker, but by Saab the defense contractor and airplane manufacturer.

At around the same time, there was a startup called Electromotion, which was based in Lexington, Massachusetts. As Old Cars Weekly reported in 2007, the goal of Electromotion was to assemble an electric delivery truck with the hopes of scoring a contract with the United States Postal Service.

What Electromotion produced was a little truck with a 1/3-ton payload. This truck featured a sliding tray housing 14 lead acid batteries that added up to 84 volts. These batteries provided power to a motor rated at 21 HP continuous with a burst of 47 HP. The whole truck measured 12.8 feet and weighed 4,500 pounds loaded. A spec sheet claims the truck’s top speed was 40 mph and it had a range of around 30 miles on flat ground. The postal service would have gotten this for $7,000 per unit in 1974 money.

The idea behind this truck, which is often referred to online as the Elbil, is that the mail truck would drive its route, return to the depot, and if needed, you could slide out the 14 batteries to swap them out so the truck can go back out again.

Why do I mention Electromotion? Well, this firm, as well as another called TJ Electric, built these mail trucks after raiding the Saab parts bin. These trucks had a chassis of a 95, the front-wheel-drive transaxle of a 93, plus the wheels and bumper of a 99. Most sources paint the project as having been designed and engineered by Electromotion with Saab providing the parts Electromotion couldn’t find on a shelf.

Old Cars Weekly continues that Electromotion marketed an open-top passenger version of the Elbil called the Islander to be used as an island hotel shuttle. Allegedly, Electromotion also had a network of 20 dealerships. However, it’s believed that Electromotion sold only a handful of Elbils before going out of business and it never got the USPS contract it was hoping for. Reportedly, Electromotion owed Saab money, and Saab repossessed what was left of the Electromotion operation, taking one finished vehicle with everything.

A cool thing about the Electromotion trucks is that some of them have survived into the modern day. One was found for sale here in America while another was sold across the pond in Europe.

As Old Cars Weekly notes, the leftover Electromotion truck was then shipped to Sweden where Saab’s engineers would continue the EV’s development. According to Autoblog, Saab would then produce two prototypes. One was built in 1975 and one more was made in 1976.

Both of these are said to have been built in Linköping, Sweden, and one of them was given an updated face. Just one Saab Elbil truck allegedly has the face of a Saab 99. Sure, the truck wasn’t really a Saab 99 underneath, but the new face made the Elbil look more like a Saab product as opposed to the sort of janky shed build look the Electromotion truck looked like.

Autoblog notes that the Saab version of the truck had its own chassis, but it’s unknown just what parts Saab’s engineers changed under the skin. The publication goes on to note that Saab’s automotive division wasn’t so happy about the mail truck, so documents were not preserved after the project ended.

One surviving piece of evidence was a hearing before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Advanced Energy Technologies and Energy Conservation Research, Development, and Demonstration. In that hearing, it was stated that Saab joined forces with two other firms in continuing mail truck development.

The paper suggests that the motor stayed the same, however, Saab got the batteries up to 95 volts and the top speed rose up to 47 mph on flat ground. The max weight was also 4,409 pounds. The Elbil is sometimes credited as being Saab’s first EV, even if it was only somewhat a Saab.

What else is known is that Saab kept the tray holding lead acid batteries and it was a working prototype. Saab also put seats from a 99 in its mail truck prototypes. However, unlike the Electromotion trucks, the Saab prototypes never delivered a single thing as they never left the prototype stage. Thankfully, the history of these trucks lives on.

The Saab Elbil prototype that looks like a Saab 99 can be found in the Saab Car Museum in Trollhättan with 7,000 miles on its odometer. Likewise, National Electric Vehicle Sweden (NEVS), the firm formed out of the corpse of Saab, bought an Electromotion truck.

Technically, this means one of the most obscure Saabs ever built isn’t really a Saab. If the Old Cars Weekly report is correct, Saab took a Saab-based mail truck designed by Electromotion and slapped its corporate face on it. Still, it’s pretty awesome that, at least for a very brief moment in the 1970s, there was a such thing as an electric Saab mail truck.