Time to go to the mechanic. It's a phrase that strikes fear in the hearts of car owners everywhere. This is one of the main reasons why Toyota and Honda have been so successful—their cars usually require little besides basic maintenance. But if you aren't driving a Corolla or an Accord, there's an antidote to mechanic anxiety, and his name is Walter Wong. Wong owns Right Solution, a garage on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles that specializes in Saabs. Walter, referred to by some loyal customers as the "Saab Whisperer," doesn't just fix your car—he helps you develop a relationship with it.

Saab owners have an appetite, even a lust, for this kind of thing. At the moment, however, the future of the Swedish automaker, currently a subsidiary of General Motors, is uncertain. As a condition of accepting federal bailout funds, GM is on a brutal timetable to prove that it's restructuring itself toward viability. The first major deadline is Feb. 17. As part of this process, GM is conducting a fire sale of Saab, after pledging that it would never do such a thing a year ago. So far, only a single, unnamed buyer has been mentioned in the press, but GM has denied being widely rebuffed. Off the record, a few possible suitors have been discussed, including Fiat, which just took a stake in Chrysler.

There's also the possibility that Saab will be shed from GM's collection of divisions and left to fend for itself with Swedish management (a retro-orgasmic outcome for Saab enthusiasts) bankrolled by the Swedish government. In this scenario, Saab would flee one bailout for the embrace of another.

The Economist provides a crisp rundown of why, for 20 years, GM and Saab have been an awkward match. When GM picked up half of Saab in 1989 (the other half was purchased in 1999), the biggest of the Detroit Big Three was facing increased competition in North American upscale markets from German imports and the then-new luxury marques emerging from Japan. In the 1970s and '80s, Saab, along with Volvo (now owned by Ford and also for sale), had developed a cult following among a relatively narrow demographic: thoughtful, eccentric types who would rather chew glass than drive anything German. Every time these people stuck a key into their Saab's ignition, idiosyncratically mounted next to the shifter between the front seats, they chuckled with self-satisfaction that they would never become the kind of oily Reaganite yuppie who drove a Bimmer.

They didn't care if they were spending a few weekends every month in the shop learning about turbo bypass valves, because Saab's expertise with small-displacement turbocharged engines thrilled them. It thrilled GM, too, because it wanted to obtain turbo know-how. Turbocharged four-cylinder engines can deliver performance on a par with V6s but without packing on extra weight (plus, turbo just sounds cool, like quadraphonic Blaupunkt or Fender Stratocaster). But GM also figured it could slick Saab up and market it not as a versatile tenure-mobile but as a Scandinavian riposte to the Germans.

In order to slot Saab into its global manufacturing model, however, GM had to bring it into the family. And that meant building new models on a vehicle platform that it was already using for its German Opel brand (ironically transforming a Swedish car into something more Teutonic) or simply rebadging Subarus as Saabs when GM held a piece of Fuji Heavy Industries, Subaru's parent. Platform engineering enabled GM to greatly reduce manufacturing time and costs for Saab through the 1990s, but it also sucked much of the Saab-ness out of the brand.

Worse, it didn't consistently grow sales, which have seesawed for decades and took a nose dive in 2008. It created an orphaned brand in a company that was already being forced to discontinue Oldsmobile, dial back Buick, reinvent Pontiac, revive Saturn, and unload Hummer. Critics have argued that Saab's legendary quirkiness was a poor partner to GM's increasingly truck- and SUV-centric, Red State conservatism, but that's too broadly negative. While Saab was foundering and the turbo hook was fading, GM was recasting Cadillac as a near-exotic brand and convincing plenty of customers that Corvette was a budget Ferrari.

Adding to GM's troubles with Saab was the migration of once-devout Saabists to a new generation of vehicles, such as the Prius and the utilitarian Honda Element. The idea had been to upmarket the brand, to woo striving, cosmopolitan thirtysomethings away from the dark clutches of the merciless BMW 3 Series. But the Diesel-jeans-and-iPhone set wouldn't be caught dead behind the wheel of a ride that seemed better suited to a schlub like Miles from Sideways (whose Saab was borrowed by Hollywood from Wong's fleet).

To its credit, GM never totally transformed Saab into something it wasn't. A typical review of the latest Saab model usually acknowledged the brand's offbeat history and then went on to award high marks for handling, versatility, and, of course, safety. Pretty nice ride—that was the consensus. Just not an [Audi, Acura, BMW]. The Big Money remembers being on a test drive of the Pontiac G8 GT, a 361-horsepower sled that can do zero to 60 in around five seconds, with Jill Ciminillo of the Chicago Sun-Times and concluding that, yes, the G8 was a hot car and that Corvettes were also swell but that Saabs were still all righty.

Nevertheless, GM has often lacked a basic understanding of branding voodoo. The aforementioned Pontiac G8, for example, just became available in a high-performance GXP trim. Coupled with a fairly no-nonsense interior and clean exterior styling, the automotive press immediately likened it to a pre-Chris Bangle-era BMW (plenty of enthusiasts think the "Driving" part of the "Ultimate Driving Machine" has become secondary). But go to the Pontiac site, and you have to dig for it.

In the case of Saab, GM was confronted with a prototypical automotive version of social networking: Owners wanted to talk about their Saabs, and they often did this online. Wong's garage on Venice Boulevard is like a little club. Do these people fantasize about traveling to Sweden? Why, of course they do—to see where Saabs are made. The popular British car show Top Gear probably paid Saabs the highest compliment possible when it ran a segment that labeled used Saab 900s as "solid as a rock" and "so much cooler than a BMW." GM tapped exactly none of that and insisted that you should buy a Saab because, as the latest advertising tag line argued, the cars were "built from jets." (Saab has its roots in aviation, but the wannabe-fighter-jock crowd is more likely to get juiced over a Shelby Mustang.)

Regardless of whether GM can sell Saab, the problem of the brand remains: Buyers these days are far less individualistic about what they drive. Decades of Japanese reliability, German engineering, and a Detroit car business organized around trucks have doomed the idea that there's a third way. The Swedes were basically the only remaining alternative in the United States, and now that long national flirtation appears to be drawing to a close.