Friends, we are gathered together to pay our last respects to a fallen brother. Saturn was the love child of Roger Smith and Hal Riney; one was the Chairman of GM, a manufacturer of cars; the other, an ad man extraordinaire, a manufacturer of emotions. Let us savor their own words as we remember the brand that was Saturn, starting with these from Roger: (Saturn will be)“a quantum leap ahead of the Japanese, including what they have coming in the future. In Saturn we have GM’s answer – the American answer – to the Japanese challenge. It’s the clean-sheet approach to producing small cars that in time will have historic implications…(Saturn is) the key to GM’s long-term competitiveness, survival, and success.”
So how exactly does a “clean-sheet” car end up sharing the same styling as a mid-size Oldsmobile that came out one year before the Saturn? The answer to just that one question alone sheds light on why Saturn was destined to fail. It’s not that the first Saturn’s styling was such a significant factor in itself, but it was profoundly symbolic of GM’s inability to escape itself, even when trying to hide deep in the green hills of Tennessee. Escape from stagnation and decline, and attempts at re-invention from the outside-in, are as old as civilization itself. I’m not a historian, but finding a successful model for Roger’s folly eludes me. Weak organizations and civilizations get overrun by dynamic ones, or just peter out.
I do fancy myself a bit of an automotive historian though, but I’d almost forgotten this important tidbit: the Saturn was originally planned to be sold by Chevrolet. The whole concept of a completely separate division and dealer network came later in its protracted eight-year development. Now there’s some serious food for thought: how differently might things have turned out if it had been a Chevy. Because the decision to make the Saturn “A Different Kind of Car Company” not only reflected GM’s hubris and unrealistic expectations, it also directly created the mortal bind that Saturn inevitably found itself in.
Sure, in its heyday, the unique Saturn dealer experience and no-haggle pricing was a breath of fresh air. But these were both ephemeral; the pricing policy went out the window when small car sales weakened, and smart dealers of all persuasion (more typically Japanese brands) began to improve aspects of the dealership experience.
Saturn’s early days feel-good vibes had all the fervor of a quasi-religious cult. It was a triumph of advertising and marketing; a brilliant campaign engineered by San Francisco’s Hal Riney. GM did one thing right with its choice of Saturn’s agency. Riney’s first big claim to fame was commissioning a song by Paul Williams for a Crocker bank commercial. It became the monster hit “We’ve Only Just Begun” by the Carpenters. And he created the “It’s morning again in America” spot that helped get Reagan elected. Notice a recurring theme? 
Yes, America loves re-inventions more than real inventions. But its attention span is short, and moves on the next new thing pronto, especially so when the underlying product is less than memorable. Or the next fad just around the corner is something different altogether, like trucks and SUVs. There you have it, a brief summation of Saturn’s woes. Now for the automotive details:
The Saturn wasn’t a bad car. There, that didn’t hurt so much. Obviously, a distinctive and fresh design rather than an old Olds hand-me-down shrunken tee-shirt might have been in order. If you’re going to plow $5 billion (back when billions were still impressive amounts) into a new car, at least buy it a new suit. Was the Saturn competitive? That’s debatable. It definitely wasn’t as good as its clearly stated target, the Honda Civic. It might have been as good or better then the gen2 Civic when the Saturn project started. But by the time Saturns finally arrived in the summer of 1990, the Civic was already nearing the end of its brilliant fourth generation, and heading for the fifth. That probably wasn’t on Roger’s mind when he spoke the words at the top of this article.
The Civic and Corolla were on a roll in the eighties and nineties, with a new generation arriving like clockwork every four years. And it showed, in their relentless refinement. The Civic engine hummed like a Stradivarius (a Japanese brand of sewing machine). The Saturn engine growled like a coffee grinder. Saturn interiors were always obviously cheap. Corolla interiors (of the nineties) weren’t. Honda and Toyota might have been worried about Saturn initially, as they were briefly about the Neon, but needn’t have. It was GM, after all.
Granted, there are/were many happy Saturn owners out there. It handled quite decently (no better than the Civic though), was commendably light and toss-able, and owners loved the plastic body panels, especially in the rust belt. The Saturn got good fuel economy, although nothing near the ridiculous 45 city/60 mileage EPA numbers GM promised during the long gestation (they ended up at 27/37; 21/31 adjusted). Reminds me of the 45 mpg claims GM was throwing out a year ago about the Cruze. We’ll see about that.
The really big problem with Roger’s big Saturn idea is this: where do we go from here? Was that even considered? Ok, by throwing enough money at it, GM showed that it could make a decent, reasonably-competitive small car. Does that make a viable car company/division? I don’t think so (and didn’t at the time). And that’s where the whole Saturn experiment begins to take its inevitable ugly turn.
When the market shifted away from small cars to bigger cars and SUVs, Saturn, as a separate entity, suddenly looked like an answer to a question that never should have been asked. Now GM felt it had no choice but to develop a whole line of cars, SUVs, mini-vans, and even a sports car to try to back-stop Saturn’s decline – right during a time when development dollars at GM were getting scarce. In the meantime, the S Series soldiered along on the same platform for some ten years. It became an endless robbing Peter to pay Paul nightmare. As well as a colossal joke: why was Saturn selling that rebadged mini-van piece of crap, the Relay? Or a gigantic seven seater SUV, the Outlook? Mission statement ADD at its worst.
If GM had stuck to their original plan of selling the Saturn as an entry level Japanese-fighter at Chevy dealers, the whole disaster could have been avoided. GM would have had an import fighter where it belonged: in its biggest dealer network. Yes, we might have missed out on the Spring Hill “Homecoming”, and the rest of Hal Riney’s hokey feel-good BS. But the warm and fuzzy memories of it are worth paying for with our tax dollars, no?
Speaking of which, the re-invented New GM is reminding me all too much of the “Different Kind of Car Company”. Which in turn reminds me of the song that made Hal Riney famous:
We’ve only just begun to live,
White lace and promises…
We’ll find a place where there’s room to grow,
And yes, We’ve just begun.
Yes, friends, it really is Mourning again in America.
Wow, another fantastic article in your repertoire, Paul. Thanks.
Now there’s some serious food for thought: how differently might things have turned out if it had been a Chevy. Because the decision to make the Saturn “A Different Kind of Car Company” not only reflected GM’s hubris and unrealistic expectations, it also directly created the mortal bind that Saturn inevitably found itself in.
GM would never have sold this car as a Chevy. The reason Smith created Saturn was because the bureaucratic nightmare that was GM (and especially Chevrolet) couldn’t be bypassed. If this car had been put through the Chevy mangle it would have ended up being a slightly different version of the (wretched) contemporary Cavalier, and the other Saturn “fluff” would have died at the hands of dealer and corporate fiefdoms.
Smith, to his credit, knew that he couldn’t do shit within the GM framework. The trainwreck GM10 more or less proved what happens when you try to implement significant changes, so he tried to do an end-run around GM: developing a proof-of-concept that would show the rest of the company how it should be done.
It might have worked, too, if a) Smith was a better leader (he wasn’t: if he was, he could have effected change at GM) and b) the whole rest of the company didn’t have a vested interest in seeing Saturn fail. No way in hell were the hundreds of GM lifers going to be shown that what they were doing was in any way wrong. Better men than Smith would have had a hard time of things when the whole rest of the company’s will was bent against him/her.
The same situation played out with small cars several times, and most recently with hybrids and EVs. GM has an incredible depth of pigheadedness: if they don’t think something will work, they’ll happily spend billions making their point, writ large in failure.
The other problem, of course, is that the domestics in general and GM ion particular had already pissed in the small-car cornflakes several times by then and no amount of PR was going to get lower-middle class people to take the risk en masse. I remember my parents seriously looking at an SW when our Corolla (a sedan) was getting cramped for five people, but they just couldn’t forgive the experience of the Citation they had for six weeks, or the Dodge Aspen we just retired, or the reams of evidence in Lemon Aid and Consumer Reports of the domestics noncomittal to the small car.
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/the-truth-about-saturn/
I doubt very much I would have bought a Saturn if it had been badged as a Chevy. To me, GM was badly tainted–BADLY–and Saturn, as a separate company, had the freedom to be different.
The styling may have been derived from an Olds, but it was a superb execution of what had been grade C styling on the Olds. It was a real cool-looking car. I used to get complements from women.
It handled really well (provided the road was not bumpy). Very tossable. I miss that in my Accord, although the Accord is not bad. A friend, a former race driver, loved driving my Saturn, and insisted once on driving it around the track at Summit Point. (It was a really really hot day, I felt lousy, and I stayed out during his romp.)
I disagree with PN’s comments about the market going large, leaving Saturn behind. (See my TTAC article.) They totally lost me when they abandoned the cool-looking design and went blah in ’96, and had they concentrated on improving the car’s problems (coffee grinder is indeed a beautiful metaphor for the sound of that engine), and had they given out new engines to those with the oil use problem instead of pretending the problem didn’t exist, it would have continued to sell well. The one design, after all, sold just shy of 300k units in ’94.
Should have thought about naming more.
The Saturn Uranus might have sold enough vehicles to place billions of bucks into the coffers.
I am so juvenile.
What was the thought behind that stupid sliding seat belt arrangement.
And wasn’t Saturn going to do everything up to and including a moon launch or something like it.
then going into the dealer to find a series 3 civic competitor
What should have happened was that Saturn should have been a subdivision of Oldsmobile, a la Scion. Setting up an entire full division with seperate dealers to just sell plastic-sided Corolla-clones was always doomed to failure-there was absolutely no way GM could have made money by doing so. And, once they’d convinced the world that “Saturn” meant “plastic-sided Corolla-clone”, their attempt to start selling mid-sized cars and SUVs and sports cars and stop selling plastic-sided Corolla-clones was also doomed to failure.
@ psar: You forgot the unique UAW contract that had a bull’s eye on it from the moment the ink was dry.
The knives were drawn the minute Roger Smith left the building
Heathroi: automatic seat belt similar to that used by many cars of that era; passive restraint solution, supposedly painless
fantastic breakdown, Paul–on a really intriguing subject.
one thing about those SL’s…they were, and are still, a testament to the fact that American’s can build a dependable small car. The interior was cheap, the design ho-hum, but I still see plenty of them on the road, looking younger than they should with those plastic panels. They had a good following, also. Two important moments of Saturn’s failure were 1) the introduction of the LS cars, done on the cheap, and 2) the entirely underwhelming and hideous Ion, which put a fork in Saturn as a serious domestic choice in comparison to the Japanese. Everything about those cars was wrong…hideous inside & out, CVT transmission, built as cheap as can be. The only reason they aren’t regularly considered some of the worst cars ever is because nobody bought them so we’ve all already forgotten about them.
NN: Saturn sold a half million of them and it was Saturn’s best selling car, always out pacing the VUE.
The 2005 ION & up didn’t have the CVT or Aisin 5 speed auto and shared 800 improvements and upgrades with the then new Cobalt. And the Ecotec didn’t and doesn’t suck oil nor do the Aisin and Hydramatic blow their differential pins. The platform is good. The execution sucked.
Of course the ION should have come out with those details in the first place.
Didn’t Chevy launch the Geo line around this time? And didn’t that go the same way as Saturn?
NN, they weren’t nearly as dependable as Hondas.
1) the aforementioned oil use problem. Mine began using when it had around 15k on the clock.
2) around 135k, the damn thing began nickel and diming me to death. I was taking it into the shop every two months during the last year I had it.
The style change in ’96 was a total bummer. It was like yuk, is this a Hyundai, a Tercel, or an Olds? The first time I saw it, I couldn’t tell.
But the plastic panels were wonderful, in terms of avoiding parking lot dings. My Accord–alas–I wish it had plastic panels.
I don’t miss the coffee grinder engine at all.
I do miss the look of the car, and the low stance. It was a car that you wear, like a roadster.
I don’t know about GM hiding in the green hills of Kentucky, but wasn’t the Saturn plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee?
David: My 95 had it’s head replaced twice in two weeks right before the 36,000 mile warranty was up.
The ION was a better car than the S Series, but by that time everything was better.What wouldn’t have been ?
Should have been better than a CIVIC.Even as it was the ION was good for 100,000 units a year. Compared to the Astra it was a phenomenal success.
This same template shows up at GM at the start of every decade. Just change the dates on the hubris and voila: press release done. Let’s go have a cocktail.
For all practical purposes, Saturn was at a different price point than the Honda Civic when you look at content. I believe the Honda’s usually came out about 2k to 3k more and many of their trim levels didn’t even offer what Saturn offered standard (traction control, ABS, the DOHC engine in a low price level).
The first gen Saturn was a success. GM’s failure was their inability and unwillingness to…
1) Wind down the Oldsmobile line and send that product to Saturn
2) Minimize cannibalization between Saturn and Chevy/Pontiac
3) Expand Saturn operations and practices to more than one assembly plant.
One aside here. It can be incredibly frustrating to get certain 1st gen Saturn parts even though parts were made in such abundance. They were always changing one thing and refining another. Which translates to only certain parts being available with certain model years and specific trim.
Beneath the skin this model had one of the largest number of changes, modifications, and mechanical redesigns of any vehicle I’ve ever seen. The last couple of years actually have outstanding reliability for this class.
Another great article. When I read that Saturn was going away, I thought back to the hoopla that surrounded Roger Smith’s original announcement, and then the big homecoming in Spring Hill. All for nothing, I guess.
Around 1995, I had the chance to talk to a UAW member who helped draft the original Saturn labor contract. He was under no illusions as to what GM management really thought about the whole experiment, but the surprise was that he admitted that the UAW leadership hated it, too.
One small detail – Saturn did not copy the styling of the Olds Cutlass Supreme. Stylists working on the W-body Olds saw the Saturn under development and cribbed the wrap-around rear window and other details for the Cutlass. Oldsmobile stole from Saturn, not the other way around. But even with the delays in the introduction of the W-body, the Cutlass Supreme debuted before Saturn.
It’s interesting to contrast the different approaches that GM and Ford used in the late 1980s in developing small cars.
GM thought it needed a clean sheet for everything – from the car, to the factory to the dealer body. It therefore spent billions on Saturn.
Ford, meanwhile, teamed up with Mazda to develop the second-generation American Escort. It spent much less and had a car that was basically as competitive, without the added burden of an entirely new division.
Grandiose plans and lots of money spent do not guarantee better results…
I had a 1993 Saturn SL2. It was not dependable. I was on my third alternator in three years. It got totaled when someone ran a light and hit me.
I really didn’t like the car that much. The car (auto) had a “Perf” button for performance mode…which just let the engine growl a little longer before shifting. These cars were certainly not about performance…
Off topic, but that Olds killed American (at least GM) cars for my mother. After chronic front suspension problems with her Chrysler Fifth Avenue, my father bought my mother a 1991 Toyota Camry. At first she was upset because the Fifth Avenue was a much more “luxurious” car. After a while though, she appreciated the fact that her car was not in the shop every three months.
Regrettably, (depending on who you ask) my parents divorced in 93. She moved (with me) to a different city and a new job with a car provided. She left the Camry with my father. That provided car was a 1992 Olds Cutlass Supreme that she inherited from the person previously employed in her position. A little more than a year old, the Olds had trim carpet peeling off the doors and the plastic dash panels warped under the Florida sun.
Also, it sounded as if the muffler was going to fall off during initial acceleration.
Since then, it has been Toyota, Honda, and Lexus.
She is considering purchasing a new car, but in her own words, “GM can keep their POS cars as far as I am concerned.”
Around 1995, I had the chance to talk to a UAW member who helped draft the original Saturn labor contract. He was under no illusions as to what GM management really thought about the whole experiment, but the surprise was that he admitted that the UAW leadership hated it, too.
Yes, the original Saturn contract and plans really united old line GM management and UAW leadership in a way not seen again until the demands for a pension bailout, which became eventually the demands for an overall bailout.
So in one way, Saturn did foster management and labor unity. Not in the way intended, though.
Paul, you just keep hitting them out of the park. Bravo!
“What was the thought behind that stupid sliding seat belt arrangement.”
Penny pinching. For several years US law considered those motor mouse seat belts the equivalent of air bags, AKA “Passive Restraint Devices”. The original thinking behind air bags (a GM invention, BTW) was that they would be an alternative to seat belts and would protect people too foolish to buckle up. Now, of course, we view air bags as an additional protection beyond seat belts. But back then the industry lobbied the feds to allow either form of passive safety protection. Lots of car makers used those &(*)&)( motorized belts. I had a VW Passat with them and the darn thing always wanted to rip your ears off if you didn’t duck after closing the door. I know that Volvo never stooped to using the things, but I think most of the car makers did for some portion of their late 80s, early 90s production.
“Of course the ION should have come out with those details in the first place.”
GM has a long inglorious history of releasing cars before the development work is really done, then sorting them out over several years of production whilst sticking it to the early year buyers. Eventually the car gets to be ok, but by then its reputation is in tatters and nobody will buy them. GM then kills the product. Corvair, Vega, Fiero … the list is long.
“Grandiose plans and lots of money spent do not guarantee better results…”
Can I have an Amen? AMEN!
Can you believe that the Saturn website ( http://www.saturn.com ) still doesn’t mention the shutdown of the brand yet?
I’ll miss Saturn as much as I’ll miss Uranus.
Twotone
My opinion the SL2 worked it looked fantastic it was relatively trouble free. (It was no Vega) The dealerships got it and the consumers followed. There was simply no follow up. Too bad the Oldsmobile Intrigue wasn’t made a midsize Saturn and too bad they didn’t spend money to advertise it. They took too long to develop the midsize saturn and the L series just didn’t cut it. The ION might have been a decent car but it looks weird while the early Saturns were good looking cars. This is no deadly sin. The L series and the Ion are in my opinion deadly sins. That’s what killed Saturn and ultimately perhaps GM. Good effort and no timely follow up.
DweezilSFV: The SL, at one point, was selling 300k+ units a year. I don’t believe the ION ever sold half that many, per year. That was where, in my mind, GM blew it. Of course, the Astra is another story, but it was never given a chance (i.e. no marketing, no plans to produce it in a manner that would allow GM to sell it at a competitive price).
If GM had made the ION a true homerun car, Saturn’s story may have been different. They could have taken some engineering cues from the excellent (for the time) Astra, and just built an attractive car with quality components. It could have built upon a still-positive association with Saturn. Instead, they released a car that, upon it’s initial debut, wasn’t even remotely competitive with the Civic/Corolla.
I was in middle school when Saturn came out. A friend’s mom bought one. She was super excited. In talking about the car, I mentioned something about GM. She wouldn’t believe me it was a GM car. I think a lot of people took the brand-new car company thing a bit too literally, which may well have been the intent. I think a lot of people, based on the commercials, thought a bunch of venture capitalists got together and made a brand new independent, nation-wide car company from scratch!
riko :
October 6th, 2009 at 11:30 am
Didn’t Chevy launch the Geo line around this time? And didn’t that go the same way as Saturn?
Yes, this helped to screw Saturn over. Chevy was selling cars that directly competed against Saturn. Instead of incorporating these vehicles with Saturn, GM gave them another competitor.
I would have made Saturn a part of Chevy and only offered them to Chevy dealers that signed a new contract to do the “Saturn” approach (i.e no haggling, new facilties, great customer relationships). And then I would have given Saturn the only line up of small/er cars and CUVs for Chevy dealers. Hopefully this would have convinced other Chevy dealers to change.
I had a ’91 SL2 and really liked it. But man that engine really burned the oil after a few years.
I think that Saturn was GM’s last, best hope at finding its way in a changing, globalizing auto manufacturing environment. If gas prices hadn’t sunk, taking the small car market with it and enabling the bloated fad of SUVs as basic transport, perhaps Smith could have kept up the fight long enough for both management and labor to see that the auto world was changing around them, and perhaps even Ford and Chrysler would have sat up and taken notice. Instead, the Big 3 simply went on auto pilot for the 90s, ignoring the new automotive reality being demonstrated in Asia. And now I own a couple of these zombies.
Excellent article…kind of sad to ponder what could have been.
Have to agree with commenters here that a large part of Saturn’s early success was that it COULD be seperated from the rest of ‘bad’ GM in consumer’s minds…GM had ALEADY burned enough bridges by the early 90’s that millions would NEVER consider a ‘regular’ GM car, so Saturn being a seperate entity definitely helped sales.
They had a run of a few good years, and then the poison set in…Keeping up with the Toyondas of the 90’s would have required Herculean funds, effort, engineering focus, and otherworldly commitment on GM’s part. Waaay too much to ask of dysfunctional GM.
Also, there was no way in Hell the other divisions were going to let upstart Saturn ‘show them up’…starved for development funds, and with it’s corporate siblings at it’s throat…GM reached into it’s old bag of tricks, and began using smoke and mirrors in an attempt to keep up the ‘Saturn Magic’, and the slow death began, probably 15 years ago.
If GM had made the ION a true homerun car, Saturn’s story may have been different. They could have taken some engineering cues from the excellent (for the time) Astra, and just built an attractive car with quality components. It could have built upon a still-positive association with Saturn. Instead, they released a car that, upon it’s initial debut, wasn’t even remotely competitive with the Civic/Corolla.
The problem there, I think, is that GM watched Ford make a car that utterly shamed the Civic and Corolla (the Focus**) yet failed to break Honda/Toyota’s stranglehold. That a) the Focus had awful teething problems and b) that you’re not going to crack a competitor’s stronghold in six months didn’t seem relevant to GM.
Hence, the Ion (and Cobalt/Pursuit-G5): half-baked and middling at best, but at least it was cheaper to make than the Focus!
** For all the talk of Saturn being revolutionary, Ford’s Focus was the car that actually beat the Asians at on their home turf. The Civic didn’t eclipse it until 2007, and the Corolla is just getting there now. It’s a real shame about the fourteen recalls in one year, because it really could have made things better.
I have often said that GM has never built a decent small car. I think I have to acknowledge that it built but one, the original Saturn. Notice I did not say a GREAT small car, but a decent one.
That said, I always thought that Saturn (the last real GM Division) missed a great opportunity. With the space frame construction and the plastic body panels, I always assumed that it would be dirt cheap to freshen the looks of the car every 2 or 3 years. That, coupled with some refinement of the engine and chassis could have allowed Saturn to avoid the 4 yr Civic/Corolla new platform cycle. A periodic fresh skin and interior would have squeezed a lot of use out of that first platform, and Saturn buyers would have been happy.
I have always considered Saturn as proof that even in the 90s, the GM orgainizational blueprint set out by Alfred Sloan in the 20s (centralized administration and decentralized operations) was successful. But just like with the other Divisions beginning in the 60s, once the effective control over operations was ceded to GM central, Saturn became nothing but another badge to be glued onto the grille (or another “brand” for Ron Zarella to manage).
One of my wife’s relatives is still driving the Saturn he bought new in 1990 or 91, and he remains quite happy with it.
ClutchCarGo: If gas prices hadn’t sunk, taking the small car market with it and enabling the bloated fad of SUVs as basic transport…
Did the small car market really tank? The Civic and Corolla were strong sellers throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. If I recall correctly, both were among the top-ten selling vehicles before the big run-up in gas prices.
The Escort was also a steady seller, and the Focus did very well until it was sunk by a blizzard of recalls. It has since rebounded.
The Saturn S-Series was a strong seller, but its sales tanked because GM failed to keep it competitive, not because buyers didn’t want small cars.
There seems to be a pretty strong and steady market for cars the size of the Civic, Corolla and Focus.
I think it is less that “the small car market went away” than it is “we don’t want to build vehicles for that segment because we aren’t good at it, so we’ll pretend that it doesn’t exist.”
And I never understood how GM let the Saturn/Oldsmobile lookalike contests to get into the dealerships.
I have a friend who has a ’98 SL1. It’s got about 160,000 miles on it now, and while it’s been relatively trouble-free for the 40,000 miles she’s owned it, it’s a major pain to fix when something does break.
I’ve found that the Contour I had for a brief period of time to be a much more refined car, though neither one would win awards for comfort for road-trips due to the sheer lack of an armrest on the SL, though the SL is a lot quieter than the Contour could ever hope to be.
We caravanned back to Dallas from San Antonio one time, and we had a fuel-economy challenge, she beat me by 2mpg, getting 37 to my 35 on the same road. I think she was cheating by drafting me.
For her, it’s a nice little first-car despite it’s flaws in execution. It’s held up remarkably well despite being a ’90s GM car and the way she takes care of it.
You can see in the top pic how poor the exterior styling was, not just weird, but poor, the curved panels up front clashed with the squarish butt.
And the interior and the vewry noisy engine and the poor transmission were even worse.
The laughable thing is, these, obsolete the moment they went on sale, primitive cars were supposed to fight the best of the Japanese Imports, the CIvics and Corollas?
Laughable.
What a loser. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
I knew quite a few people who really loved their Saturns. My suspicion was that they preferred the dealership experience more than the car itself. One friend was showing me his car, a beautiful maroon wagon with nice light tan leather seats. He really liked it even though with less than 30k miles on it he had already had to replace the alternator, battery, and charging system. But then he was coming from an old Falcon….
geeber: You are right about the small car market being of a decent size all through the 90s-00s. Can you imagine what Saturn could have done if GM would have skipped the Cavalier/Sunfire/Geo episode (both from a sales pirating standpoint and a development dollar standpoint). If GM would have then transferred the NUMMI interest to Saturn, this Division could have been a very successful small car operation for GM.
We had a 1997 SL1. For seven long years and only 29,000 miles, during which it demonstrated that American know-how was mostly limited to marketing. It replaced a 14-year-old Volvo 244 which had given us over 140,000 miles of service. The Saturn never put out enough heat, despite dealer protestations that the thermostat was working properly. It had to have a fuel injector replaced and was on its way to needing a water pump – soon. The wheels were starting to rust. Fuel economy was OK but not stellar. Handling was OK but not … The interior was spartan but OK for the price …
God Bless Ammurika — home of the fleet car.
We replaced the SL1 with a Forester.
The Geo brand was a weird, weird egg. Two Suzukis, an Isuzu, and a NUMMI-built Corolla clone (which in its previous generation Chevrolet had sold as the Chevy Nova). With Saturn, you could certainly see what Roger Smith was thinking, whether it worked or not. With Geo, well…
This isn’t to say they were necessarily bad cars. My parents had a 5-speed ’90 Geo Prizm for quite a while, which was utterly bulletproof mechanically and amazingly fuel efficient, although the interior trim was flimsy. But even the Chevy dealer they bought it from didn’t know what the hell to make of it.
I knew quite a few people who really loved their Saturns. My suspicion was that they preferred the dealership experience more than the car itself
That is absolutely correct, my mom went from Buicks to Saturns and couldn’t have been happier, the cars weren’t great, but the dealer always treated her that way (to the point that she didn’t actually mind waiting) and because of that her last three cars have been from saturn. Developing loyalty in spite of quality and looks and you realize how much GM had to work at making it not work.
Excellent Article, Paul.
At the time it was introduced, I thought that the Saturn, as a car, was not much, but the concept was excellent. Given a chance, Saturn might have taken off, since it was all about branding rather than anything specific.
Saturn was supposed to be ‘your honest neighbor’ in the car business, imho. That still resonates enough that Penske was almost willing to buy into it, even though he didn’t have any specific vehicles to sell.
I’ve personally seen the great divide that a new major gamble like Saturn can cause in a company. Young managers, engineers and executives are excited, and want to be part of ‘the next big thing’.
However, the culture makes it clear that if the project fails, you’ll carry the black mark on your career for years. You can’t be part of a project that fails, and come home to a promotion. Further, all of your old-school bosses are against the project since it (as stated above) suggests the way they do business isn’t good enough. So… unless the plan is a sure-fire instant winner, all the smart kids stay home and nobody volunteers; they get assigned.
So the project gets set up by an ad hoc team, who then get the Hell away as fast as they can as soon as they dare. The post-startup managers are caretakers, not innovators, – and the project eventually withers and dies.
RIP Saturn.
I drove a 1998 SL2 for 6 years before selling it with 190,000 miles on the odometer. It burned oil from the 30,000 mark onward, but was remarkably reliable otherwise. It was also, for me, at least, relatively easy to work on. The starter was a real pain, but most things were easy to get to.
Until about the 2000 model year, they used a plastic covered temperature sensor in the S-Series. This would degrade and break in short order. You can find plenty of older Saturns with mysterious throttle surges and other ailments due to running rich for sale. Buy a cheap one, pick up a brass temperature sensor, check the oil every time you put gas in, and you can have a very cheap, but reliable, ride.
…you realize how much GM had to work at making it not work.
Nicely put.
GM didn’t need to spend all this money on the Saturn. They didn’t even need to crawl into bed with Toyota on yet another small-car project.
Clearly, GM simply didn’t have the talent to do a stellar small car and never has had.
What they did have, was Japanese know-how in part-owned Isuzu and Suzuki, and what they should have done was to set-up Saturn design and engineering using Japanese and American talent, given a free rein to do an uber-competitive car. Which would have come out at least 4 years before the Saturn designed in America did.
Then – literally – take away the small cars from all the other divisions and make Saturn the place to go for small cars. The no-hassle place, the only thing they got right.
Next step would have been to do a small diesel car (using Isuzu expertise), like within 2 years.
Next step would have been to do a small diesel SUV type car (kind of like a current day Subaru Forester) with all wheel drive, within another 2 years. (This would have brought us up to the time when the Saturn actually did come out).
Then do the electric car (EV1) and leave it on the market just to make a statement.
Finally, Oldsmobile should have been given a 2nd line of all-new, individual cars, a new sub-brand much like Saturn, called “Aurora”. The V8 car would have been the top of the line, then a mid-sized car along similar lines (perhaps even using basic design components from Opel – in other words Aurora should have had the L-series cars – could have been sold by Oldsmobile-Aurora dealers. This could have saved Olsmobile.
Saturn could have saved GM, literally.
I had an Escort with an automatic sliding seatbelt and I liked it because the car made the seatbelt decision for me-most of the time.It needed a little help occasionally. http://www.mystarcollectorcar.com/
Lots of car makers used those &(*)&)( motorized belts. I had a VW Passat with them and the darn thing always wanted to rip your ears off if you didn’t duck after closing the door.
There was an even cheaper option which GM used all over the place. They simply mounted the whole seatbelt to the door. This is how it was in my ’90 Sunbird. Of course it was impossible to actually get in the car with the seatbelt buckled, and I believe GM suffered some lawsuits of people falling out of the car in accidents where the door opened. The Sunbird had a hefty catch to hold the door closed in an accident, I guess then I would have been trapped in there. I always admired the simplicity of the solution and the successful ducking of the regulations. Certainly not much worse than the mouse motor solution where most people forgot to buckle the lap belt, yeah that was real safe.
The Sunbird was an extremely durable car BTW, I drove it to 230k miles, the last 10k of which the second head gasket let go, bubbling all the way refusing to die…
No, there was no way in hell Saturn could have saved GM, ever. It had nothing to offer from DAY 1, when, after YEARS of delays, Saturns were finally on sale, and of course, due to the delays, what was an OK car a few years ago, became a dated, lacking design when it DID go on sale, years late.
Not only did Saturn RUIN GM, it is largely responsible for the closing down of OLDSMobile, the 100 year old division with a glorious history whose logo Saturn almost blatantly copied, and which it cannibalized.
Geeber:
It’s not that the small car market tanked, but it did shrink. Toyota and Honda responded by enlarging their models to meet changing American tastes, the Big 3 responded by ceding the market to Japan and later Korea. If GM had been able to keep focus on the Saturn model of manufacturing and marketing, at least that division wouldn’t have been kneecapped by gas prices and the economy in 2008. And if Saturn had shown real results from a mngt/labor collaboration, I think there would have been a chance that other divisions would have had to make similar changes. However, SUV mania (and no Asian competition in that space) made it possible for both labor and mgmt to keep their heads in the sand for another decade, by which point it was too late.
the saturn cult
http://zippythepinhead.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=30-Jul-97&Category_Code=jul1997&Product_Count=25
I am a Saturn fan, and have had five of them. I still have two.
The Saturn was the culmination of everything GM could have done in 1985. It had the space-frame and flexible panels of the Fiero and the GM minivans, top notch dealerships, cult worship, excellent gas mileage, a great engine and it was American made in Tennessee! It handles great and has one of those weird lovable personalities rarely found in a Honda or a Toyota. It was full of character and flukes.
The S series was a two hit wonder. The first series looked dated, had a weird Nintendo style dashboard that looks hilariously cool now, and Oldsmobile sedan styling. But GM had no follow up. There were no other models for five long years.
But in 1996, GM got lucky again when the S series was restyled beautifully, with more sound insulation, with the glitches were ironed out and it sold extremely well for a refreshed model. So GM was lucky enough for the 1990-1995 model to have bought them time enough to have launched another cool larger Saturn alongside the refreshed S series. It seemed that GM didn’t expect Saturn to actually work, and was left flat-footed for the next model that was needed before the S series was restyled.
Saturn ended up with a very poor L series. Had GM actually believed in Saturn, they would have had the L series worked out. The car looked like an afterthought. The styling was derivative of the 1996 S series, but lacked any refinement or quality. So Saturn had a warmed over S series, selling well, but nothing else.
A decade goes by and nothing happened. Instead of making Saturn work, GM ignored it. GM had all the money in the world, thanks to SUVs, but they didn’t cover their bets by investing in the successful innovative car company named Saturn. We all knew that eventually the market would return to small cars, and Saturn would have had more than just a beach-head in that market. Saturn was ready, but GM wasn’t.
GM missed the CUV craze when Saturn should have had the VUE before 1999. The VUE fit Saturn, and ended up being their best seller after the S series was discontinued. It was an attractive vehicle, and sold well and got good reviews. Once again, GM didn’t even consider Saturn instead of getting it ready for the small car market’s eventual return.
Saturn floundered for a decade while most everyone in the business knew that eventually people would stop buying SUVs and trucks. The market got ready for Saturns, but GM didn’t prepare Saturn when the market returned.
A Saturn is a space frame vehicle with flexible panels. It has excellent gas mileage, great dealerships, a devoted following, and offered uniquely American vehicles. So when Saturn was offering expensive Opel rebadges, they were not Saturns – even though they were very good cars. Saturn was more than just another GM brand, but by 2007, that is all they were.
Oldsmobile copied the Saturn sedan. That says more about how badly Oldsmobile was being ran than Saturn. If Oldsmobile didn’t have a clue what it was supposed to represent by 1990, and was willing to crib off the new kid, not yet launched, they had a bigger problem.
If Saturns were sold as Chevrolets, I would never had bought one. I had a Chevrolet Cavalier and a Chevrolet Citation fresh from the dealers. Coupled with the less than optimal experiences I witnessed with other Chevrolet owners, I still wouldn’t give two figs for any of them. Saturn was different. They tried to be something GM wasn’t. But GM let them down too.
I think the failure of Saturn is due to a simpler cause: out of date product. The first-gen car was decent and competitive, but the second gen car, introduced in the mid-’90s, was a simple restyling. By that time, the design WAS uncompetitive, and it showed. In particular, the engine was thrashy, and the structure was far too flexy.
That, I think, is where Saturn truly lost its way.
At the same time, what did they offer to the devoted buyers who wanted something bigger and nicer to move up into? Nada. Those buyers moved into Accords.
And I disagree with Paul about expansion of the line being tantamount to marketing failure – no U.S. car maker alive has survived simply by making compact cars.
Autosavant :
October 6th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Not only did Saturn RUIN GM, it is largely responsible for the closing down of OLDSMobile, the 100 year old division with a glorious history whose logo Saturn almost blatantly copied, and which it cannibalized.
GM was ruined long before Saturn sold it’s first car. Delorean and Perot were bitching about how screwed up GM was in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Last years meteoric rise in gas prices and the recession only hastened the demise of an American auto industry already weakened by decades of declining market share. With its sprawling low density suburbs and the most cars per capita, American society is more car oriented than anywhere else on earth, but the deaths of Chrysler and now Saturn are harbingers of the inevitable end of traditional American car culture.
To continue reading go to “America’s Answer to Japanese Car Imports is Dead at 19”
http://thegreenmarket.blogspot.com/2009/10/americas-answer-to-japanese-car-imports.html
Wow, this brings back so many memories and so many frustrations. I worked at Saturn from 1991 to 1999. It’s sad to see the brand disappear entirely, but to be honest the company was dead a long time ago.
A few thoughts about the details that are often forgotten. First, as a Saturn employee, one was not considered a GM employee. Until about 2000, the company was a wholly owned subsidiary and one’s career was very tied to Saturn except, it seems, for executives brought from GM to Saturn but rarely the other way around.
Culturally, a lot went went away when Skip LeFauve left the company. Under Skip, quality lapses and recalls were an opportunity to correct things properly and in a customer-focused way (remember the commercials about flying seats and an engineer to Alaska when the customer couldn’t get the car back to Seattle where she purchased it? True story). Under subsequent leadership, issues like cracking cylinder heads on the single-cam engines were brushed under the rug until dealers and customers were almost in revolt.
Some of the quality issues with the first gen cars, like the aforementioned alternators were, I believe, due at least in part to GM policy requiring the use of AC Delco parts. Remember, the parts company was a part of GM until the mid to late 1990s until it was spun off as Delphi. You’ll note that the cars made after the spin off had alternators that could last longer than 50k miles.
@JohnHorner: Airbags (perhaps windbags is a better term) certainly do continue find their place at GM (see Lutz, Whitacre, Smith), but the safety kind were NOT a GM invention.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbags#Invention
Wonderful article.
Glad to see I’m not the only one who read “Comeback”
I’ll never forget the time I took out my used Saturn on a test drive. I unintentionally scared the crap out of the sales guy parked in the back seat at least two times, but he just kept chattering away.
I never expected it to be a Honda. The interior was hilarious, the handling was tippy, the engine was all bark, and the paint was an awful color, but it’s been rock-solid even though the HVAC and cooling system have been a little wonky. It’s still in service with no big problems minus a valve-body for the tranny at nearly 100k.
Going by what I’ve seen online, I was very lucky.
RIP, Saturn, I wouldn’t be where I am now without that car. At least ya made a couple good ones.
One small correction: The “morning in America” ad campaign helped Reagan get re-elected (in 1984), not elected. (At the time I lived in Minnesota, the only state to reject him that year. I was and remain proud of that.)
alfred p. sloan: Glad to see I’m not the only one who read “Comeback”
Comeback? What’s that? Seriously.
@FreedMike
I don’t know what you’re smoking, but the first gen styling would be contemporary and cool-looking today (I owned a ’93 SL2 5speed), and the second gen styling was gawd-awful. After they restyled the Saturn, I was embarrassed to tell people what I drove, because it looked so dorky, and the tight handling was gone.
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/the-truth-about-saturn/
I would be driving one today if they’d stuck to the original mission: a practical person’s sporty car with cool styling, and continuous quality improvement.
I always thought the first-gen Saturn looked like the Cutlass, and I always thought the second generation Saturn SL (1996 until the Ion) had a similar windshield/roofline as the 1997+ Grand Prix.
David Holzman :
October 6th, 2009 at 11:39 pm
@FreedMike
I don’t know what you’re smoking, but the first gen styling would be contemporary and cool-looking today (I owned a ‘93 SL2 5speed), and the second gen styling was gawd-awful. After they restyled the Saturn, I was embarrassed to tell people what I drove, because it looked so dorky, and the tight handling was gone.
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/the-truth-about-saturn/
I would be driving one today if they’d stuck to the original mission: a practical person’s sporty car with cool styling, and continuous quality improvement.
Hey, it’s been a stressful day – I’d like to be smoking something.
I don’t know where you got the idea that I found these cars to be ugly, but they were far from styling masterpieces. Are we talking about the first two they made until the Ion?
I remember shopping Saturn in 1993, right before I got married. I had a 1988 Mercury Tracer that I’d used as an over-the-road salesman’s car (well over 110K miles), and had been wrecked once. The poor car was so clapped out that my soon to be wife refused to ride in it. Theleaking brake fluid may have had something to do with that.
Anyway, I toodled down to Saturn to check them out. Nice dealership, but I never liked the thrashy engine or the imprecise shifter. And I always hated those huge body panel gaps (yes, I know they served a purpose) – they made the car look cheap. I bought a Mazda Protege and never regretted it.
I guess it’s a matter of personal taste…
NN: Absolutely true, but still ION was Saturn’s best seller and at retail, not all dumped into rental lots, so it isn’t true that “no one bought them”.It still sold better than the VUE ever did.
The ION has plenty of shortcomings but it is at least a better car than the S Series in most areas:engine,any trans but the VTi[aka CVT]is better, ride, quiet,NVH, trunk space, ease of entry and exit,shorter turning circle. But agreed:by that time, using the S Series as the standard made the ION copmpetitive with nothing.
A shame as the Delta platform and Ecotec are a good base for a small car.
GM always looked backward when bench marking their small cars.Someone else’s previous Gen. something that was available during development that virtually guaranteed GM’s offering was out of date on arrival.
And the ION proved their cynicism, their culture of letting the public finish their R&D, their lack of knowledge of what Saturn buyers wanted [weird, not functional],and Saturn in general reflected GM’s attitude toward it’s passenger cars: introduce,big fan fare,then let rot.
To : Paul Niedermeyer
Comeback: The Fall & Rise of the American Automobile Industry. Paul Ingrassia, Joseph B. White.
Was the Saturn competitive? That’s debatable. It definitely wasn’t as good as its clearly stated target, the Honda Civic. It might have been as good or better then the gen2 Civic when the Saturn project started. But by the time Saturns finally arrived in the summer of 1990, the Civic was already nearing the end of its brilliant fourth generation, and heading for the fifth.
I came of driving age at this time and I have to disagree with you on this point. If these cars were so much better, why is it I see so many early Saturns still rollin’ by and almost none of the late 80’s, early 90’s Toyota/Hondas? And to the rice burners I do see from the Shoegazer era, none look even remotely as good as your example above. Saturn’s, on the whole, have been shown to be very reliable cars.
menno – Clearly, GM simply didn’t have the talent to do a stellar small car and never has had. Spoken like a person who has never been to Europe and driven an Opel. The Astra is Europe’s top selling car, so much so that Hyundai is pushing a Elantra 5 door that looks like a 90% Astra 5 door there and in the US. GM can build a nice small car. They simply chose not to because they didn’t think there was any money in it.
What GM forgot is what McDonald’s learned years ago. Hook ’em early and hook ’em hard. If you build quality entry level cars, the customer tends to want to buy your more prestigious models when it comes time to trade in.
Digging into the memory bank, there was an article on Autoextremist that said that the early SL looked like an Oldsmobile because in GM’s grand master plan Olds was the “step up” for Saturn owners, which also explained why the larger Saturn (L series was both late and lame). FWIW my mom owned a 94 SL2 and loved it but when it came time to replace it with something roomier she took one look at the L series and leased a Passat. I’m still driving grandma’s 97 SL2 and while the NVH and attacking seatbelts are fixed, the ergonomics are still crap and baby seats and roof racks are both a PITA to install. I’d upgrade it but my wife wanted a new cyclocross bike more than a new car.
@dolorean23
Gotta disagree with you about gen1 Saturn quality as compared with Hondas. (I owned a ’93 SL2, and I liked it a lot.) Well, I don’t absolutely know, but I can think of several reasons why you might see more gen1 Saturns than civics of that era.
1. we tend to see what we are interested in seeing, or what we want to see. When Ted Kennedy first ran for senate, in 1963, a friend of my parents’ ran as an independent. All I ever saw were Hughes stickers. Then, at some point, in my first act of rebellion, I decided I would support Kennedy. I never saw any more Hughes stickers. After that, all I saw was Kennedy. I am also very good at spotting frogs in ponds, where most people would miss them.
2. Perhaps you live in a part of the country where more people bought gen1 saturns than civics of that era.
3. it’s also conceivable that people tended to keep the saturns running more than the civics, because they didn’t get dinged in parking lots, and hence looked like they were in much better shape. That sort of thing can skew peoples’ propensity to preserve their cars.
The really interesting number to have would be the percentage of 90-95 civics vs saturns still running.
On the other hand, maybe we should be cmparing at least SL2s against Integras. My choice ultimately boiled down to Saturn vs Integra. In terms of reliability, I definitely made the wrong choice.
You can read something about why Saturn quality wasn’t that good in my TTAC article, as well as what I liked about the car
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/the-truth-about-saturn/
FreedMike,
I was talking about the ’90-95 Saturns. I still think they look very cool. And the SL2s handled very nicely. But yes, the engine was full of NVH, which wore on me, and, well, you were smart to get a Protege instead of a Saturn. I got a new engine at 65k, because of the oil use problem, and because i had a record of complaints back to 17k, I paid $700 for the engine to be installed–the difference between the cost of getting a ring and a valve job (which normally solved the oil use problem) and the cost of the new engine. In the 130K range the car started nickel and diming me to death.
both the styling and handling on the second gen SLs sucked.
“The Civic engine hummed like a Stradivarius (a Japanese brand of sewing machine).”
Hilarious, Paul… I’m surprised I’m the first to say so.
Also, you mentioned the Neon as being a momentary concern for the Japanese automakers… Being a bit of a fan of the 1st Gen (I still drive a ’98 R/T), I’d love to hear a story about that one in the future…
Keep up the good work – fantastic retrospectives!
In the Midwest, first-gen Saturns have mostly outlived their Japanese competition. The Civics and Corollas of the era were, and are, extremely rust-prone. Finding junkyard body parts for Civic race cars of the era is virtually impossible; they are all rusted.
@Jack Baruth
@dolorean23
While there are some running early Saturns in the Maryland burbs of Washington, DC, you can’t swing a dead cat in the poorer parts of the area without hitting a circa-1989 Corolla or Accord.
I found the Saturn Article and Comments really great reading.
During the height of the “Saturn Craze”, I purchased a new 1994 SL1 and sold it 10 years later with 120K on the odometer. I found it to be a generally pleasant and reliable car to drive. My wife hated to see it go and commented: “After 10 years, it still looks brand new!” (a soft rag and a dab of toothpaste worked wonders on those plastic panels). After I bought the car, Saturn Corporate sent me a long, detailed questionare which I duly filled out. I did note that I liked the car although the SOC engine was “terribly noisy” and the back seat was “hard as a rock”. I never received a reply for my effort (and the engines remained noisy and the back seats just as hard in later models).
I now have (two) “his and her” 2002 Oldsmobile “Intrigues”(GM orphans) which I bought used (cheap!)and keep in mint condition….. I love’em.
I never had an “Asian” car, so I guess I don’t know what I’m missing, but I don’t see how they could be much better than my two little “Orphan Oldsmobiles”.
I had a 91 SL (5MT, no power steering) for almost 10 years. Always leaked oil until I started using the cheapest stuff Quaker State sold. Never an oil leak after that. Thank you, Mr. Sludge. Horribly uncomfortable seats, but otherwise a decent economy car. Had 190K on it, with zero dents, very nice paint, and the original clutch, when I sold it to a kid. I’ve done far worse with “better” vehicles.
Power6 – my ’87 Accord had that seatbelt attached to the door as well. I learned to live with it. I certainly like it much better too than the motorized track. Had a Ford version (I think) hit me in the head and kept going wrapping the belt over my neck b/c I was dumb enough to lean out the door when I closed thepo door b/c someone called me at the same time. I had not been in one of those cars with the automatic belt before.
dolorean23: If these cars were so much better, why is it I see so many early Saturns still rollin’ by and almost none of the late 80’s, early 90’s Toyota/Hondas?
Th Hondas are worn out. Like 200K miles worn out. My ’87 Honda Accord was used up to the tune of 325K+ miles by the late 90s. I’ll make a big leap and say that the Saturns were driven shorter distances or more as second cars than primary cars? Yeah big leap on my part.
Shoegazer era…
What’s that?
spoken like a person who has never been to Europe and driven an Opel. The Astra is Europe’s top selling car…They simply chose not to because they didn’t think there was any money in it.
That’s been bothering me since I moved back from Italy in ’94. WHY aren’t they selling those cars here??? Already designed and paid for. Why not? Can’t be safety b/c Europe’s standards are similar to our’s. Can’t be emissions anymore b/c Europe is equally picky on those topics as well.
When we DO get a European import it’s either watered down until nothing interesting is left or like the Astra it is sold for such a short time that nobody even notices it arrives or left. OR-the parent company (Ford or GM) has such a poor quality rep that people assume that any European import products will be even WORSE than the domestically produced cars. The Dodge Sprinter remains to me to be about the only exception. What I haven’t asked any Sprinter drivers is whether the Mercedes name helps them sleep better at night? I’d own a Merc Sprinter or an Opel Astra or a Euro-Ford long before I’d consider a Daewoo or Mitsubishi or Isuzu. The problem with the Astra is in about ten years it’ll be like keeping a Merkur X4RTi on the road. Saw one of those the other day… Still interesting to look at. In a good way…
I have two vintage aircooled VWs and I CAN get parts but I wouldn’t want to try to drive it daily too far from home.
If you build quality entry level cars, the customer tends to want to buy your more prestigious models when it comes time to trade in.
EXACTLY. Honda has been great every time I have bought them and I’ve never worried about buying another Honda product. My VWs have consistently had the same problems so I’m at least well versed in the care and feeding! LOL. I probably ought to start over and learn an American product’s care and feeding but I have to find the vehicle interesting to want to keep it going.
Hmmmmnn…I always thought they looked like grille-less Corsicas. Not an especially stellar pedigree either. Regardless, a wholly agreeable read, this.
@ Dave Holzman – I think you’re talking about Heightened Awareness; i.e., I’m familiar with Saturns having owed a few and are more prone to see them. To a certain extent this is true, with caveat. I travel TDY a lot and manage to go to many different states and countries in a year. I don’t typically notice a early 90s Saturn, but do notice an old Toyota Tercel hatchback, untouched Honda CRX, or the rarer Nissan Sentra fastback. I really wanted these cars when I began to drive, but couldn’t even afford a 3-5 yr used model. This being said, every late 80s, early 90s Japanese car I see now usually has rust eating through it faster than a cop on a KrispyKreme and more than a few blowing more blue smoke than your average coal plant. Don’t see the same with Saturns.
joeaverage – Shoegazer is a music term given to British and a few American bands in late 80s, early 90s before Grunge was mainstream. Bands such as RiDE, My Bloody Valentine, Catherine Wheel, and Lush had a layered, distorted, amorphous sound to its melody that a British rag stated, “The shatteringly loud, droning neo-psychedelia the band performed was dubbed shoegazing because the bandmembers stared at the shoes while they performed”.
I had a 1996 Saturn SL that I put 150,000 miles on. The only non maintenance repair that I can remember was a new alternator at some point. It got excellent gas mileage. But it was noisy, the seats were uncomfortable and used lots of oil.
When I went to check out the Ion to relace the SL I was shocked at how bad this car was. There was no way I was going to pay $18,000 for it. So I ended up with a Toyota which was/is a much better car–although a little on the boring side.
Saturn in my eyes was always a huge waste of money for GM. They would have been far better off using the funds to improve what they already had, which was a lot back then and a hell of a lot more than now, offer the no haggle purchase price and Saturn like buying experience to divisions like Chevy and Oldsmobile and kept there products fresh by facelifts or redesigns every 4-5 years instead of letting things stagnate for 8-10. So what does clueless Bob Lutz do for GM in 2005? Add badge engineered minivans, SUV’s, sporty coupes and mid sized sedans to a company that had nought to turn over a profit in years wasting countless funds and resources that could have been used to feed Pontiac and Buick. Now we have no more Saturn, Pontiac, Saab, Hummer or Oldsmobile and are instead left with a low priced economy division in the form of Chevy, Buick that is trying to be Pontiac, Saturn and Saab all in one and failing miserably so far at that and Cadillac that has such an identity crisis going soldering on with there bread and butter V8 gone for 2011, bland generic meaningless letter named cars like the STS and only one half way decent car in it’s lineup worth mentioning the CTS or the was it meant to be a Buick downgraded/scaled SRX with underdisplacement 3.0 liter V6 engines. GM is in for a rough road ahead folks.
The Saturn SL series was made from 1991 to 2002. The SL series always recieved better than average reliability rating from Consumer Reports Magazine. In 1994 GM sold over 300,000 S-Series Saturns making it the #9 best selling car in the USA for 1994. After the SL series was discontinued no Saturn models recieved a recomendation from Consumer Reports Magazine until the Outlook and Aura in 2007.
I currently own a 2001 SL2 with 188,000 miles. In 2001 I traded in a 1991 Buick Regal for the SL2. I came across the Regal in a parking lot summer of 08 still on the road! In the 1990s GM made some good cars.
As early as 2004 the Buick Regal was Consumer Reports Magazine’s most reliable mid-sized car. Also, the Regal’s twin the Oldsmobile Intrigue was highly rated. Ufortunatly, the only people to enjoy the Intrigues and early 00’s Regals(two great cars) were rental car customers and seniors. In the meantime in 2000 Saturn was given a mid-sized sedan the L-Series based on a Sabb. The L-Series was a reliability nightmare as was the ION. If Saturn were given the Intrigue in 1997 instead of Oldsmobile things could have been better. Also, the Pontiac Vibe should have been given to Saturn instead of the ION.
As a teacher I like to look at statistics. I would encourage anyone interested to study Consumer Reports magazine reliability ratings over the past 20 years or so.
I enjoy the S series. It was a quirky little car. I think it was one of the few economy cars that you actually could have optioned with leather in that time frame. But the other nice thing about it is that you also had the choice to have the car as spartan as you would like.
At heart I am a Toyota person but I still love my Saturn. My family has had many and my mom currently has an 03 Camry which I know would be soulless and boring as can be if it weren’t for it being the SE with the 5speed manual. And I am always searching for a Lexus.
I currently have a 2000 SL1 with 211000 miles(I got it with 182000).
I really like that car. The only options mine has are the automatic transmission, the cd player, power steering, and a/c(i count ps&a/c as options because the belt routing diagram in the engine bay has a dashed line that skips the a/c and ps).
The interior is cheap but that is one of the things I like about it. Its cheap but it just works.
And the car works most of the time. But when it doesn’t it is pretty easy to work on and I love being able to change the transmission fluid myself and just about as easily as I change my engine oil.
I will admit that the transmission is not the most refined(but I think that is due to people not changing the atf).
When I first got the car the transmission was all around clunky but I changed the atf and got a rebuilt control valve body and installed it myself and the shifts became perfectly smooth.
I also love how the car uses itself. I would love for mine to have the manual transmission but the automatic suffices. I say this because it has always supplied me with the gear and ratio(seeing as it has 2 ratios for each gear) I wanted and held it until i needed it no more. I also love how it will momentarily disable the a/c under hard acceleration. In short I feel that the car is able to squeeze every bit of power it has out of itself.
The engine is very loud and angry and it does get irritating sometimes but for the most part its just quirky. And when you don’t want to hear it there is the radio. To me those 4 little speakers do a great job for as cheap as the whole car is, its no high end stereo but it can still drown out the engine noise and keep its quality. And as far as I know the 1.9s in the Saturns were actual Saturn engines and only used in Saturns(Someone please tell me if I am wrong), not just another generic motors engine.
I also love the way the SL handles. My friend thought he could take a corner in his volvo at the speed I normally take it at without any worries and I found myself grabbing the oh crap handle because it wasn’t having the corner.
I also love the gas mileage of the SL. I by no means drive economically and I do 50%city driving and 50%highway and the worst I have ever averaged is 30mpg and I normally average about 34mpg.
I used to be afraid of ever being hit in the SL but that changed the other day. I was rear ended by an 08 Saturn Sky and I was afraid to get out and look at my back end but when I got out I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was just a little bit of paint missing from my back bumper but the Sky was destroyed and had to be towed away.
I will admit the seats are not very comfortable and I think that all of the SLs should have come with the center console/armrest because mine had the open center console without the armrest and that was extremely annoying so I ordered the console/armrest on ebay.
I have driven a 99 Corolla(with 273000 miles) and I will admit that I liked it because it was cheap, quiet, and smooth. But the biggest problem with it was that I felt disconnected with the car and with the road. There was nothing wrong with the Corolla because it did everything quite well but it was just missing something and I think it is missing a soul. I could go from point a to point b everyday in the Corolla but I wouldn’t be happy. Somehow despite the faults of the SL it seems to put a smile on your face.
I haven’t driven a Civic from the 90s but I have driven a 96 Accord(with 45000 miles). It did everything well just as the Corolla but the interior was iffy. The seats just felt like they were just there for show. They weren’t extremely comfortable but they weren’t completely uncomfortable. I didn’t like the vinyl headliner or the annoying exhaust(it was factory), the creakiness of the suspension, and the pass through trunk was as useful as it could be I did like the steering because it didn’t feel numb like a Camry or a Corolla does. But just like the Corolla it felt like something I would drive if I only wanted to get from a to b and nothing more and nothing less.
I have also driven an Ion but I do not recall what year it was, that is how much I cared about it. The Ion has some quirks to it but it still doesn’t have the quirks of the S series. The thing that killed me the most about it was seeing the ecotech under the hood. The interior was not that great and the climate control on full felt like an asthmatic was trying to blow air on me through a straw(I don’t know if it was wear and tear or if it was just that bad on all).
To me the idea of Saturn was dead after 02 but it is still sad to see the brand die completely. And its also upsetting to see Olds and Pontiac go too. I would have rather seen Buick go.