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.