I, too, am often intrigued by Saab Sonetts. My father has one. he bought it off a friend of mine when I was in high school.

There are a few things you should consider about Saab Sonetts.

1) They have all the chassis rigidity you would expect from a fiberglass car.

2) Due to the mechanical nature of the headlight retractor, people over 5'10 have a choice between "seeing at night" and "shifting at night." The lever pulls out far enough that it captures your left knee after dark, making it difficult to actuate the clutch.

3) It's powered by a Taunus V4. Worse, it's powered by V1.0 Taunus V4, which were leftover engines from the failed Ford Cardinal project, which were sold to Saab when Ford Industrial decided they would make shitty tractor engines.

4) I mean, it's powered by a failed tractor engine. It's also a 60 degree V4, which any fan of engines will tell you is going to require one mammer-jammer of a counterbalance shaft to keep the fucker from rattling itself apart.

You may notice in this example that the counterbalance shaft gear has no teeth on it. This is due to the fact that Ford, in their infinite wisdom, determined that a tractor engine was not likely to experience many abrupt throttle changes and that the best isolation would be provided by making the counterbalance shaft gear out of phenolic.

5) Which, okay, on a tractor it probably doesn't. On a 1700lb 2-seater sports car? I personally have stripped the teeth off that gear with one spirited stoplight launch. It feels a lot like all of a sudden you're driving an unbalanced V4. Because you are.

6) We acquired the Sonett when we already had 2 96s with 5 spare engines because you nuke that gear so often that it's easier to pull an engine, put a freshy in, tear down the old engine and get it ready for the next time you cook off that gear. Which is so hard to come by it's easier to buy four or five dead Saabs at a time.

7) except getting the mill out of a Sonett means pulling the entire front clip, which takes the better part of the morning. At least with a 96 the hood comes off in 10 minutes. We could get the engines out of a 96 and back in again in a couple hours. Sonett? That was a weekend, minimum, and if you stopped to watch Star Trek and drink a beer you were finishing in the dark.

8) and if you start considering engine swaps, remember that your only real choice is Subaru, which is too wide for the engine bay, but you can get away with a Mazda 13B, but now you need a new transmission because that ridiculous little 4-on-the-column freewheeler they stole from the 96 is going to nuke at the first application of horsepower so now you're looking at a Subaru transmission and a Mazda rotary and with the amount of effort you're putting forth you could just, you know, buy something that doesn't suck.

Go with god.