Teach me about Saab 9-5 Wagons

As my '95 Volvo gets older I have been noticing more and more the '99 - '01 Saab 9-5 wagons.
The pricing seems very low for the age.
Are these a good purchase?
What are the trouble areas?
Which is better 4 cyl turbo or 6 cyl?
Are the automatics reliable?
Is the manual reliable, expensive/difficult clutch?
What are the good online resources for this marque?

The pricing seems very low for the age. - There's a reason for that, above and beyond epic SAAB depreciation.

Are these a good purchase? - Yes, IF you get a good one - get records of everything or walk. They have lots of room and are very comfortable long-distance cruisers. I also found mine to be a bit soulless, however.

What are the trouble areas?
- Sludge, for one, in the 4 cyls due to poorly designed PCV system. Ignition modules die without warning and at inconvenient times. Low pressure turbos die early deaths. Weak oil pump design on the 4 cyl. Front wheel bearings need to be done at 90-100k miles. Blend flap door linkage breaks expensively. 6 cyls are so bad as to be an instant deal-breaker in my book: timing belt tensioner failures, oil-to-water intercooler failures, general inaccessibility of everything in the engine bay.

Which is better 4 cyl turbo or 6 cyl?
- See above. Aero 4 cyl is the best of the bunch.

Are the automatics reliable?
- Supposedly, but mine ate itself at 130k miles.

Is the manual reliable, expensive/difficult clutch?
- Again, supposedly reliable, but not known for a very positive shift action.

What are the good online resources for this marque? - Saabnet, Saab Central.

Soulless? Very interesting.

We got an 03 Aero sedan about 4 months ago for my wife and love it. Ours is a manual but the auto is made by Aisin who does autos for Toyota.

As 02 said be sure to look for a full service history. The big thing is the oil changes. SAAB, for some reason, said do oil changes at 10K miles but did not specify full synthetic oil, only semi. If people followed what the factory said the oil would sludge up, plug the oil pickup screen and bad things would happen. I think VAG had some of the same porblems. Anyway, if the service records are there things should be good, but to be safe I took a coat hanger put a J hook on one end and put it down the oil fill tube. If any gunk came up it was onto another car.

The ignition modules on the 9-5's are of a newer design and usually give a missfire CEL before they die, the trick with those is to user the right plugs and keep then gapped.

I have not heard or read that wheel bearings are an issue. Our car had 107K and is running great.

The two online resources stated above are great, I have yet to came across something that could not be answered there.

The V6 is not an option in my mind either. The big thing for me was why get worse gas mileage and less power for about the same amount of money. To me the Aero is the only way to go.

Another thing to think about is you can run any octane fuel in a SAAB turbo without worring about breaking something.

Over all they are very safe, very roomy and the push from the Aero engine makes me smile every time I step on it.

Go for it, they are great cars.

Agree about the blend flap door - the entire dash has to come out to replace it. My friend had his go and paid something like 2k for the repair, immediately sold the car thereafter for a Ford minivan if that tells you anything.