Swedish Automobile N.V., Victor Muller's Dutch parent to the Swedish automaker, "does not expect to realize any value from its shares in Saab Automobile and will write off its interest in Saab completely." Employees in Trollhatten, Sweden, apparently haven't been paid in weeks (though they were paid after the factory shut down last spring when suppliers stopped deliveries).

So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., often spoke of his short time selling Saabs in the 1950s. The late author never was clear on whether he actually owned Saab Cape Cod or simply worked for one of America's first Saab dealerships. As best as saabhistory.com can determine, Vonnegut, whose novels include "Player Piano," "Mother Night," "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Breakfast of Champions" was the dealership's manager - and probably its only salesman - in 1958.

The last Vonnegut interview I heard before his 2007 death was on Public Radio International's "Whad'Ya Know." He told host Michael Feldman that the dealership, operating on a shoestring, wasn't terribly ethical. Service technicians would remove the engine from one customer's car to fix a problem in another customer's car, he said.

"Slaughterhouse Five" told the story of the World War II Allied bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut wrote from experience. He was a U.S. soldier in Dresden during the attack.

I mention this because about the same time, Saab's aircraft engineers began designing their first car, the 92. After the war, the Allies stepped in to revive Volkswagen's Wolfsburg factory to keep Germany from falling back into the same kind of economic problems that led to the rise of Hitler after World War I. Saab had to find its own partners to build a viable automaker.

Saab's early 92 model's engines were two-strokes from DKW. Even Saab's aircraft used Volvo engines.

The engines Saab Cape Cod would have swapped out in 1958 also were two-stroke motors, mounted out back like the VW Beetle's. Saab switched to four-stroke engines, finally in 1967. A Ford V-4 powered late-'60s 96s and replaced the Sonett II's two-stroke I-3.

Saab used the Triumph Dolomite's slant-four for its new, larger 99, launched in 1968. Thanks to Triumph's engine reliability, Saab began building its own version of the slant four for the 99 beginning in 1972, and added the turbocharger in 1977.

That slant four was half of the Triumph Stag's OHC V-8. Rumor is Saab actually engineered the V-8 for Triumph in the late '60s and bought its slant fours to avoid the manufacturing costs. Saab even experimented with the Stag V-8 in its front-drive 99 before deciding on the turbo four instead.

Before GM bought Saab, the Swedish company shared its new 9000's platform with the Lancia Thema, Alfa Romeo 164 and Fiat Croma, and infamously moved the ignition key from the dashboard to the floor console.

By then, Saab had held on as a small, independent automaker from a geographically distant country with high labor costs during a period in which the U.S. alone lost Packard, Kaiser-Frazer, Nash/Hudson/AMC and Studebaker. It survived while teaming with other, stronger companies and by buying into their engine and body technology. Saab gained a reputation as a quirky company that appealed to drivers who didn't want to see their cars coming and going.

That's not a sustainable product plan, of course. Being part of the biggest automaker on the globe when everybody was buying and selling everybody else, or setting up strategic alliances to save on parts commonality is surely what kept Saab alive during the recession of the early '90s. That's when VW nearly pulled out of the U.S. market, and Porsche struggled to keep its lights on.

Less than two decades later, GM nearly went the way of Studebaker. Spyker Cars owner Victor Muller bought Saab in earnest in early 2010. He said he made money on the deal by selling outdated Saab tooling. Spyker paid GM just $74 million, plus $326 million in preferred stock for Saab, and received a $550 million loan from the European Investment Bank.

Muller's new Saab 9-5 and 9-4x were very attractive cars, but stickered for luxury car prices. The last Saab I drove, a $45,000 turbo-four 9-5, suffered questionable build quality, with a lot of buzziness and rattles coming through the dash.

Muller desperately wanted to get a new 9-3 to market. He said it was already heavily changed from the design work GM performed early in its development. He showed me his design for a new-age 92, a retro-teardrop-shaped small car he said was crucial to Saab's future, at the 2010 New York International Auto Show.

Of course, I'd love to see such dreams make it to the street. Saab has always been on the ragged edge, a shoestring automaker that operated as a multi-million-euro concern in a business that demands billions of euros, or dollars, just to get a mainstream car on the market. Small, ego-driven automakers from Tucker to Tesla to Fisker always have tried to defy these odds. Since WWII, Studebaker and AMC and Rover, and now Saab have been too small to survive as independent entities. Saab has made it this far only because it relied on the resources of larger, more sustainable automakers.