Saab’s Sabertooth Drone Helped Find Ernest Shackleton’s Lost Ship – Robb Report

Saab may not make cars anymore but it’s still producing vehicles. In fact, two underwater drones built by the Swedish company’s aerospace and defense division helped find Sir Ernest Shackleton’s long-lost ship, Endurance, earlier this month. The pair of autonomous crafts, which are called Sabertooths, were instrumental in rediscovering a boat that sunk in Antarctica’s icy Waddell Sea more than a century ago.

It was always going to take a tough submersible to help find the Endurance, which sank after it was crushed by ice in 1915. And sure enough, there’s no better way to describe the Sabertooth. The all-electric drone weighs 2,860 pounds and is powered by a 30.0-kWh battery, according to Car and Driver. It has a top speed of 4.6 mph but its double-hulled version—two of which were part of the Endurance22 mission, along with the South African polar research vessel, SA Agulhas II—is rated for a depth of 9,843 feet, or 3,000 meters. The drones, which can operate…