vt_hokie

I'll just miss the dent resistant plastic body panels, but those were gone a while ago anyway! To me, Saturn died when Spring Hill built, polymer clad vehicles stopped showing up at the dealers!

Same here, I'm done. All that was saved was the name - big deal. Saturn is just a marketing name that'll be used to sell rebadged imports from other manufacturers. So much for the great import fighter proving that the US could still compete!

That thing is hideous. It looks like a badly deformed Audi A6.

I disagree, I care more about providing middle class jobs to Americans than where the fat cat execs are located. In any case, how would you classify cars like the Opels being brought over and sold as Saturns, or cars like the Korean designed and built Chevy Aveo?

My parents have a 2008 Accord. It's definitely roomy! I like the styling better than the previous gen Accord, even if they ripped off BMW a bit. I do think it looks better than the 2010 Subaru Legacy, but that's not saying much! (I have a '07 Legacy, and I'm very disappointed with the new Legacy design.) The car is too much of a boat to be sporty, though.

It's both. I feel slighted by GM but also found better products elsewhere. I bought a new Subaru Legacy 2.5i Limited in 2007. GM certainly offered nothing comparable in that price range. At least my Legacy was assembled in Indiana, even though it's a foreign make. I'd rather buy "foreign" car assembled in the US than an "American" car imported from Mexico, China, Europe, etc.

Nope, I'm unemployed like a lot of Americans these days. I used to work for Loral, which went through Chapter 11 recently...actually kept my job through the bankruptcy process, but was laid off in 2008. Also, lost a good part of the company match in my 401k that was invested in worthless Loral stock. I'd actually like to replace my old Giant Iguana with a new Trek, but first I need to find a job! As for GM, the Saturn SL2 will be the first and last GM car I buy. I loved my Spring Hill built Saturn, with its dent resistant body panels, excellent reliability and ease of maintenance, but GM ruined Saturn by turning it into a standard GM division selling random rebadged GM products before killing it completely. Why would you say that? I'm one of the few who is willing to pay more for an American built product rather than support the Walmart-ization of America.

Hopefully GM will fail and go away completely. Companies that earn their success shouldn't have to compete with a company that gets rewarded for incompetence with a taxpayer funded bailout.

I agree with many of the comments here. I'd have to say that while the L Series was largely a failure, the ION really killed Saturn. The VUE, however, remained popular while it was built in Spring Hill and had polymer panels. My SL2 was the first GM car I bought, and it'll be the last. I hope some other automaker offers dent resistant plastic/composite panels again someday, though.

Saturn became pointless a long time ago, when GM turned it into another redundant division selling random rebadged GM stuff. I miss my old reliable, durable plastic body SL2, but I currently own a Subaru Legacy and I will likely not buy another GM vehicle again.

http://www.iihs.org/ratings/rating.aspx?id=45 http://www.iihs.org/ratings/rating.aspx?id=80

No question. Better reliability, better crashworthiness, easier maintenance, and better looking imho. An SL1 or SL2 was far superior to a Cavalier of the same vintage.

Saturn should go back to building sleek looking cars with dent resistant bodies like the old S Series, for those of us who don't want a Chevy with a huge obnoxious grille and gaudy chrome all over the place. Unfortunately, GM has made Saturn styling roughly equivalent to Chevy in recent years.

Saturn was about building an American car that could compete with the imports. It was something for us here in the U.S. to be proud of. If the only way to keep it going is to give it European or Korean imports to sell, I say kill it.

I think that's a different, less flexible type of plastic on those cars.

I think the Astra is ugly, but then I generally don't like boxy hatchbacks. The 2 door Astra isn't so bad, but the 4 door is almost as ugly to me as the Nissan Versa hatch! If they wanted to sell more Astras, they should have brought over the sedan and wagon versions. A hatchback isn't going to be a high volume seller in the United States.

That's GM's attitude, which proves they still don't get it with regard to Saturn. They could be selling the best rebadged imports available under the Saturn name, and they still wouldn't recapture the magic of the real Saturn.

GM won me as a customer, when I likely would have bought an import, by creating Saturn and adopting a better management and labor system in Spring Hill. I remember reading Consumer Reports back in the 80's and early 90's, when aside from maybe the Ford Crown Vic/Mercury Grand Marquis, all the domestic cars were getting much worse than average reliability ratings while the Japanese were consistently above average. Then along comes Saturn, which actually got better or much better than average reliability marks. That's when GM proved it could change for the better. Then GM lost me as a customer when they dismantled everything different about Saturn, and turned it into another crappy standard GM division. Not surprisingly, Saturn's reliability reputation went to s**t.

They're whatever GM makes them at the time. It's just a name on a badge. You could take a BMW M3 and badge it as a Buick or Chevy...wouldn't change the sustance of the car.

I think people who care more about a couple mm difference in panel gaps than about preventing dings and dents are foolish. Personally, I'll take a car with larger panel gaps that still looks new years down the road. Take a car to any crowded parking lot and it's only a matter of time until some inconsiderate person opens his/her door into the side of your car, or neglects to put away a shopping cart which then rolls into your car, or whatever. Who cares about freaking panel gaps when cars are so fragile that they accumulate unsightly dings from normal everyday use? Oh, and I can't say I ever heard my Saturn's body pop or crack. And what's the point of having all these different divisions if they're not going to cater to different people? GM has several other divisions for people who care about stupid crap like panel gaps. How about giving those of us who think otherwise a choice?

Call it a Saturn, call it a Chevy, call it Buick, call it Fred for all I care, just build a car with dent resistant plastic body panels!

I would like to see GM develop a car that can run on human feces and reach speeds approaching Mach 6.

Or have durable plastic body panels instead of easily dented thin sheetmetal.

The ION was a disaster. I don't know who decided that Saturn buyers wanted cute, feminine cars with extremely weird styling. I guess they were going for some alternative marketing thing of the sort that worked for Macintosh. But it wasn't done right with Saturn. The circle theme evident in the exterior and interior styling of the first ION reminded me of the equally disastrous oval themed Ford Taurus redesign in 1996. Add in crappy quality and one of the cheapest feeling interiors in its class, at a time when you had nice upscale small cars like the Mazda 3 about to hit the market, and it didn't stand a chance. But polymer panels weren't the reason people stopped buying Saturns. On the contrary, it was one of the unique features that defined Saturn and made it stand out. I think sales of the VUE remained high until they replaced the first gen model with that cutesy Mexican built thing. The division is pointless if it's just going to sell a slightly different flavor of Chevys.

I guess I'm just bitter because Lutz comes in and obviously his passion lies in performance cars like the GTO, G8, Camaro, etc. But he not only focuses on those, but talks down the economy cars like the Saturn S Series, which hit sales of something like 280,000 per year at its peak. He had made disparaging remarks about the polymer panels among other things. I resent multi-millionare execs telling us what we should want, instead of listening to us tell them what we want. I don't make $50 million a year, and I do care about longevity, and I appreciate things like a reliable, affordable car with good mileage and body construction that resists door dings, rust, etc. I also care about supporting manufacturing jobs here within the U.S. I don't want to buy a GM car built in Mexico or China. Maybe if more people cared about preserving our manufacturing base and maintaining a strong middle class, we wouldn't be in the mess we're currently in!