Well, these are two pretty similar cars we have here! It's only details that could potentially make the difference. Considering they both belong to the luxury car segment and utilize the same 4-door sedan body style and the front wheel drive system, it all comes up to the specific petrol engine choice they offer. The first one has a Peugeot-engineered powertrain under the hood, a 6-cylinder, 24-valves 210hp unit, while the other one gets its power and torque from a 4-cylinder, 16-valves 220hp engine designed by SAAB.

A starting point here would be to take a look at the results from European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) tests which were performed on both of the cars, with the SAAB being a slightly better choice apparently. Still, apart from the official crash test results there are other things we need to be aware of. Both vehicles belong to the luxury car segment, which is generally a very good thing safety-wise, still it doesn't help us solve our dilemma, does it? Furthermore, if we'd like to consider vehicle mass in this context too, which we definitely should, the French car offers a considerable difference of 10% more metal.

Reliability is not the best thing to consider on the make level, but it is worth mentioning that Peugeot does have a slight advantage, at least on all of the models level. These are the results of an independent reasearch, while our visitors describe reliability of Peugeot with an average rating of 4.3, and models under the SAAB badge with 4.1 out of 5. The same official information place 607 as average reliability-wise, and 9-5 is more or less at the same level.That apart, owners of different cars powered by the same engine as the French car rank it on average as 4.0, while the one under the competitor's bonnet gets 3.0 out of 5.

SAAB is undoubtly more agile, reaching 100km/h in 1.4 seconds less than its competitor. In addition to that it accelerates all the way to 235 kilometers per hour, 3km/h more than the other car. When it comes to fuel economy the winner has to be the Swedish car, averaging around 8.9 liters of fuel per 100 kilometers (32 mpg), in combined cycle. We can't ignore that 15% difference compared to the French car.

Peugeot appears just a bit more reliable, although the difference is truly marginal. The most important thing when deciding between any two vehicles should always be safety, both passive and active. In this case though, it seems that both cars show similar levels of passenger protection all together, so that won't break a tie. But one thing that actually could is the performance, with SAAB being considerably quicker, thus putting more smile on driver's face. To make things even better, it consumps less fuel! All together, there's not much more to say, in this case I wouldn't even consider anything but SAAB. In any case that's my personal view, built upon all the data available to me. What should decide here though is the way you feel about the two vehicles, and I hope you'll find my guidelines useful in the process. In case you have two minutes to spare I invite you to define your needs, desires and budget and see which car would be chosen by the virtual adviser™, out of 12.000+ vehicles we currently have in our database.