They are stout free-traders who resist the temptation to intervene even to protect iconic companies : Sweden let Saab go bankrupt and Volvo is now owned by China's Geeley.
A week after his eighteenth birthday, Ove passed his driving test, responded to an advertisement, and walked fifteen miles to buy his first own car: a blue Saab 93.
Immediately there's a disagreement between Ove and the cat about whether or not the cat should sit on a sheet of newspaper in the Saab's passenger seat.
And then the day came when Ove went to the car dealer to look at the recently launched Saab 9-3, and when he came home in the evening, Rune had bought a BMW.
Saab, the other major Swedish car manufacturer was approached by Volvo, and it looked close to striking a merger deal, but that was scrapped in the last minute as well.
When I went down for the first time in the fully assembled Saab, any number of things could have gone wrong because we had never put all the pieces together.