Some of the good features Saturn pioneered, however, will live on in other auto companies, like the no-haggle pricing for all new Scions, more customer-friendly service departments at many companies, all-thermoplastic body panels on the Smart-for-Two and some all-electric cars, money-back policy on all new GM-badged products, free hand-car washes on service appointments (that's something Saturn first shared with Lexus and Infiniti), and no-pressure showrooms at an increasing number of dealerships.

 

Good examples of Saturn's good features for sure. But a key point is that all of above cannot be protected by patents and they are all easily copied and/or are copied by the competition. So in short the successful/profitable competition copied those good Saturn features and provided superior automotive products.

 

A 14% mark up off list is a nice profit.Then add in another 3% holdback and the profit is even bigger.
I like to haggle and would never buy any vehicle at list price.

 

Who (that is old enough) doesn't remember the early Saturn commercials with the shopping cart hitting the car door? That, along with their "no-haggle" pricing were revolutionary in my eye when the brand first made its appearance. I was pretty young back then and just getting my feet wet in the new car shopping game. I almost bought one (the sedan).

It is a shame that as the years passed, Saturn became a lot less interesting to me due to my changing taste in autos. It's sad if the things that set them apart from the other brands were absorbed into GM's regular practices and it went from revolutionary to ho-hum. I guess the market felt the same way I did.

I can't say much about the ability to haggle being a priority for me, because where I live there are few dealership options and they (the dealers) know it. Most car brands are represented by one dealer. If you want the car, they know you have no other options other than a used vehicle in a private sale.

 

Not just the shopping carts..........I remember, at the D.C. Auto Show, the Saturn reps would take a baseball bat and whack the plastic side body panels to demonstrate their dent-resistance, and the durability of the plastic.

While the plastic panels showed amazing resistance to damage, the paint itself, of course, was not always so forgiving. Saturn used a conventional paint job on the metal hood/roof/trunk and a special water-borne paint process on the plastic body panels. That is because the plastic panels expanded/contracted in the heat and cold more than the metal ones, and because the paint itself had to expand, contract, and flex with the panels (hence the wide panel-gaps that Saturn was also noted for, to allow for that expansion and still let the doors open/close). The water-borne paint job was mirror-shiny (more so than even on some new Lexuses) but, unfortunately, lacked some durability because of the softness required for the panel flexing/bending.

This also made for some restrictions on which body-shops could adequately repair/repaint Saturns, because not all shops could replicate the factory water-borne paint process correctly. Insurance companies often had a list of shops that they recommended for the job. Even so, Saturns usually carried rock-bottom insurance rates......my SL-2 sedan had, by far, the lowest policy rates I've ever paid, adjusted for inflation.

 

The initial concept was great and the cars looked pretty good to boot. I remember rear seat headroom being bad and the cars sadly got the usual craptastic GM plastics over time. I actually have experience with them through friends including the SC2 with the 3rd door.

They product got stagnant and by the time they got new product it was too late. Mind you Saturn as a brand sold less or as much as Lexus, the much more expensive luxury brand.

Not good.

I always had a thing for them but GM started off good with it and then in usual fashion turned it to crap and by the time they tried to fix it, well it was too late.

 

That's just it, Mike. GM, in their infinite wisdom, didn't even try to fix Saturn after it started to go downhill. That's because they never acknowledged the real problem to begin with....the dumping of the small S-series plastic-body cars and the subsequent expansion into rebadged Opels and other conventional GM platforms. Some have argued (and I respect their opinions)that the S-bodied cars were outdated by 2000 and that Saturn had no choice but to dump them. I disagree....I still feel, to this day, that they should simply have been redesigned, updated with new safety equipment and features (like VSC, tire-PSI indicators, etc....), and maybe (?) restyled.

Now, of course, that's not to say that ALL the Saturn plastic-body cars were well-done.....that is certainly not the case. The Ion, IMO, was a joke from Day One. The 1Gen plastic-bodied VUEs are not impressive, either, unreliable, and were very crude inside. But it was obvious, after 2000 or so, that the farther away the company got from its roots/origins, the less-successful it became, and GM execs simply turned a blind eye. It was a real shame.

 

I did like the plastic bodies but I don't think it was enough to sell cars in this competitive market.

GM simply put minimal investment in it for too long.

 

Back in the late 90ies (when I didn't yet have my drivers license) I was dating this hot chick who drove a red Saturn coupe. I though it was a sports car

 

Pics or ban

 

LOL, I think it looked something like that... probably older.

 

^LOL, I don't think those are the pics that were requested.

It's kind of funny, but a lot of the weaknesses that were inherent in the original, plastic-paneled Saturn offerings were nothing that I would have really looked at. I didn't even realize the plastic was painted--if I remember correctly I thought that they were all molded in the car's color. I have to assume that this paint chipped as well.

And I do remember hearing that Saturn's were difficult for body shops to work on--although they were being advertised as not needing to go to body shops, weren't they?

As for Geo...I remember them having tiny gas tanks and getting great mileage. My aunt once rented a Geo that had a 7 gallon tank or something like that. I was young back then too, but I didn't look at the company with as much disdain as I did say five years later.

 

I remember one of our neighbors had a SL coupe for sale in that purple / pink color. When I suggested that car to my soon-to-be-driving teenage son he about gagged. I had a good laugh.

 

At the end to bring it to an end after billions in losses, it was a business decision.

Now about that pic.....

 

[QUOTE=chrisyano;5316323
It's kind of funny, but a lot of the weaknesses that were inherent in the original, plastic-paneled Saturn offerings were nothing that I would have really looked at. I didn't even realize the plastic was painted--if I remember correctly I thought that they were all molded in the car's color. I have to assume that this paint chipped as well.

And I do remember hearing that Saturn's were difficult for body shops to work on--although they were being advertised as not needing to go to body shops, weren't they?[/QUOTE]


Saturn's plastic body panels were actually were pretty easy to attach and detach....they went on and off the space-frame assembly with special clips, and you then just connected the wiring/sockets for the light bulbs as needed. That's one reason (among many) why the insurance rates were so low. The paintwork was a little trickier, as a special water-borne process was often needed, which many body shops couldn't handle......but, in some cases, already-painted panels could be ordered from the factory. On the conventional metal hood/roof/trunk, of course, conventional paint was used.

Some of the paint WAS easy to chip, but I already explained that in a previous post...the paint on the plastic panels had to be soft to flex/contract/expand with the panels themselves.