Loved mine as well, passed it on to my kid. After a couple of years driving a Volvo, I tried Saturn again; it felt like a toy. But it was there for me when I needed it.
My mom had a Saturn station wagon for many years. Very reliable, lots of very usable interior space, great gas mileage. She only got rid of it because it wasn’t keeping up with the city’s emissions standards any more (but if you take into account the gas mileage, it was probably still doing better than the Ford Focus she replaced it with).
When I first met my future wife she was driving a Saturn and loved it. Very reliable. She put a lot of miles on it.
When she finally decided to get a new car, she went with a Saturn again. But her second Saturn was a lemon that had numerous problems. It seems that quality really dropped in the interim. We eventually got rid of the car after the timing chain broke, and the mechanic said they could fix it, but the timing may not be quite right and the car may never run very well again.
Many Saturns (and some other cars built by GM in the 2000s) have Ecotec engines, and the engine has a bit of a cult following. It’s not uncommon for people to install ported heads and superchargers on them, resulting in an incredible amount of horsepower from such a small package. A friend of mine has a full-time business porting intakes & heads for these engines, and owns a souped up Red Line. He took me for a ride it in once. Threw me back in the seat when he punched it. Thing screams.
In 1984-85 my dad was interviewing for a couple jobs, and on the southern TN had progressed to the point that my parents were sitting in a real estate office in a little town when it was announced the Saturn plant would be built there. The phones all started ringing off the hook as everyone called to take their homes off the market until they could figure out what their new worth was.
We bought a SC2 in the fall of 1992. Only got rid of it in 2000 because we moved across the pond and didn’t think we’d be able to get it serviced, since Saturns were only sold in the U.S. Still liked the car and would have kept it longer if we had stayed put.
Had a recall or two, but I don’t remember exactly what had to be fixed. Found out that the pop-up headlights aren’t a good idea for deer country, as a deer managed to take out one of the headlights completely.
It had the automatic seatbelts which were trendy at the time. And the window openers were in the middle, which meant that the passenger could open and close all the windows, including the driver’s window. I miss that.
our 92 SL2 was the first new car my wife (then girlfriend) had ever purchased…it’s still in the family. There’s some scratches in the paint, but it looks extraordinarily good for a car that’s never been waxed with a 29 year old paintjob.
And around here, it seems like the only Saturns I see all look pretty good.
I don’t know what model her second Saturn was, but it seemed to me that Saturn’s quality started to decline when they replaced the original S Series with the Ion. It was around that time that Saturn lost most of what made them unique and became essentially just another GM brand, not all that different from Chevy or Pontiac.
Was it not true that in the latter years the Saturn lineup was mostly rebadged autos built by other GM divisions?
Towards the end many of their models were rebadged Opels imported from Europe. The slow selling Saturn Astra was a rebadged Opel/Vauxhall Astra. And I’m pretty sure Aura was also some Opel model, or at least heavily based on an Opel.
Rather coincidentally, at just the time the Saturn plant was being built, I was doing a consulting gig on a different industrial automation project. It was ambitious and well-funded, but it did have to be implemented within the constraints of an existing plant and further constraints imposed by unions, who saw virtually everyone working on the project as their enemy. We on the design team were a bit jealous of those working on the Saturn project, which was totally “greenfield”, meaning GM was going all-out for maximum efficiency and build quality with no prior constraints – or at least relatively few, as they did have to partner with the UAW on this.
I remember not seeing any Saturns around for months after they started selling them. When I finally saw one for the first time, I knew why it took me so long. The cars were very generically styled for their time and did not stand out at all. Also, the Saturn badging was quite subtle since it was stamped into the back bumper with no contrast in color and only tiny logos were on the front and sides. One had to get close to one of them to see what brand it was!
I always thought that if GM was going to build a whole new marque to compete with the imports, they’d at least have styled the cars to stand out and be recognized, not disappear into the sea of its competitors.
The Saturn VUE was the GM Theta platform, similar to the Chevy Equinox.
The Saturn Relay was the Chevy Uplander.
The Saturn Sky was the Pontiac Solstice.
The Saturn Aura was the GM Epsilon platform, similar to many models including the Chevy Malibu and Pontiac G6.
The Saturn Outlook was the Chevy Traverse.
The Saturn Astra was the Opel Astra.
GM had been partnering with Toyota since the early 80s (see NUMMI in California) and knew enough about how the Japanese manufacturers were taking them to the cleaners. But outside of NUMMI, there was a huge amount of resistance to change and a company culture that made implementing many of the lessons learned difficult.
Enter Saturn, an ambitious project to sidestep the GM corporate machine and compete directly with the Japanese. New plants, new products, new dealer network, all unencumbered by the existing corporate rot. The first model lineup was quite good, actually, from an engineering and driving perspective. Build quality wasn’t quite there, and the cars were certainly not up-market at all. But they were cheap, fun to drive, competitive in SCCA racing at the time, and innovative – the plastic body panels promised a future where exterior design was updated frequently to keep models fresh and unique.
I don’t know a whole lot about what happened after that first lineup, from a business perspective. Maybe everyone got fired from the project, or promoted. But like many GM ventures, it wasn’t a home run from the start so it was left to die on the vine. As others have noted, it became a graveyard for badge-engineered trash. GM briefly tried to turn it into a home for rebadged Opels, but it was never going to be profitable to import lower end cars from the EU. GM couldn’t even make that work with more upscale Holdens.
Imagine a world where GM had built on the successes of the early-90s Saturns, fixed the build quality issues, and really gave America a reason to love small cars, instead of what actually happened – all focus on GMT platforms and the high profit margins of the Escalade and Denali. Ah well.
That’s pretty much my memory of the Saturn legacy. They started with a couple of attention-getting ideas - supposed manufacturing efficiencies, no-haggle dealerships and plastic body panels - and ended up as a bunch of rebadged GM models.
I think the last remaining Saturn model was the Vue, which GM rebadged into the Chevy Captiva. In the U.S. the Captiva was primarily marketed to fleet buyers and hung on for a surprisingly long time until the Theta platform was revamped.
That was basically my reasoning for getting one; transporation with a relatively low total ownership cost. 1999 SL2, drove it for 12 years. Poor acceleration; climbing hills was annoying. Mine had an electrical issue at around year 7. Overall, a bland ownership experience, exactly what I want in car ownership.
That pretty much describes me, same commute distance too. I couldn’t drive my Ford Ranger that far every day, so bought a 5 speed manual SL1 used. It really did get 35+ mpg.
The car wasn’t anything amazing, but for a commuter car it was excellent.
My best friend/roommate after college had a couple of Saturn four-door sedans- he bought one new in about 1996, and then was in a wreck where it was totaled in about 1999, whereupon he got another one.
To me, they always struck me as being positioned as the US competition to the Japanese economy sedans/coupes like Civics, Sentras, etc… Not too exciting, not expensive, but reliable, economical and small. I never saw the attraction myself, but my buddy loved his.
That’s me, almost. I can tell the difference between a car and a bus, but not between a minivan and an SUV. To me (who was never able to get a Saturn) one of the best things about the Saturn was the no-haggle pricing.
Some friends of mine were very much into the Saturn zeitgeist – they loved the no-haggle sales approach, and they bought an SL sedan in the mid '90s. They are pretty utilitarian about cars, and they liked the idea of an affordable, fairly reliable car.
Saturn used to hold an annual “homecoming” event for owners, at the plant in Tennessee, and my friends had always hoped to be able to go (though they were never able to).
They still have that SL sedan, which is going on 30 years old; while it’s showing its age, and it’s apparently become challenging to find parts, they plan on driving it until it dies. They would have happily bought another Saturn.