Not what you want to see inside your car’s engine. This sludge is usually the sign of infrequent oil changes, or oil changes with the incorrect type of oil – all Saabs 1999 and newer should be on fully synthetic engine oil. We recommend oil change intervals to be no more than 5,000 miles on these cars, the original Saab interval of 10,000 clearly was not working.
What’s the prognosis for a car like this? With proper oil services, and use of a good quality oil, there should be plenty of life left in the engine. Attempts to remove the sludge will likely result in doing more damage than good. Worse case scenario is that some material may break loose and get into the engine oil pickup, results in clogging. Should this occur, we can clean this out.