I’ve only owned two American cars in my life, and they were both comically big body-on-frame barges. Why? Well, they made sense for the Midwest, where absurd comfort, easy maintenance, and hearty durability outweigh canyon carving and corner-exiting power since the nearest canyon is a few days’ drive away. And though I preferred the equivalent import offering to anything domestic, there really wasn’t anything similar to a GM B-Body or Ford Panther available from Europe or Japan.
That’s not to say I didn’t want more out of these things. It sounds like at least one of our readers feels the same way, since they asked me to envision what a big General Motors “downsized” B-body sedan might look like if it were sold under the banner of GM’s most import-like division: Saturn. That’s a challenge I’ll gladly take on.
But For God’s Sake, Don’t Get The Diesel
As Autopians, most of us really dig European and Japanese cars that appear to be total oddballs in the land of Baconaters. Still, as much fun as puttering around town in a Citroen 2CV or Kei vans on a decent spring day might be, even the most ardent supporters (except Jason and Mercedes Streeter) would likely agree that they never made any sense as the only car a family owned in most of America. Transporting five or six corn-fed adults in freezing temps for a few months and then searing heat for a few more is what we do here, and a typical road trip is a full day or more at highway speeds. Poor handling? Who cares? In this country, we used dynamite on natural terrain to make roads smooth, straight, and flat. Fuel economy? At thirty cents a gallon, nobody seemed to mind.
Well, that is, until they did. The fuel crisis of 1973 killed the sales of single-digit MPG land yachts like that 1976 Caprice above, and the little imports cutting up the roads made driving an aircraft carrier seem like a chore. General Motors bit the bullet with a major $600 million program called Project 77 to lose decades’ worth of added-on weight and overhang from their mainstream B-body cars. They even came up with a new word to make the type of work they were doing palatable by the average buyer: downsizing. It sure sounds a lot better than “shrinking.” This wasn’t completely marketing mumbo jumbo, though. Despite shedding around a foot in length and over 600 pounds of weight (nearly 900 in the wagons over the “clamshell” tailgate predecessors), the new 1977 big Chevys and their GM brothers and sisters actually gained interior space, all while getting far better fuel economy.
That weight reduction also allowed them to drive far better than the 1976 models. In their review of the redesigned 1977 full-sized Chevrolet Caprice and lower-model Impala, Car and Driver famously wrote that the F41 suspension upgrades “will make you think your Chevy came from the Black Forest instead of Detroit.” Hyperbole? Maybe, but those words were written by legendary journalist David E. Davis, a man who didn’t lie much in print and got fired more than once for speaking the unfortunate truth. That optional suspension package didn’t even hurt the ride significantly, all while pulling similar skidpad figures to a Porsche 911 (and unlike that car, it wouldn’t kill you if you took your foot off the gas mid-turn).
Now, fuel economy even with the standard “Stovebolt” six wasn’t great by today’s standards, but still far better than the low teens you’d get from the earlier cars.
It’s just a magnificent car that honestly doesn’t seem as large as it once did against current giant SUVs. You can compare for yourself, since if you take an hour’s drive almost anywhere in the US, you will still likely see one or two plying the streets as a testament to their great build quality. As the eighties dawned, GM continued to refine the big sedans, resulting in better aerodynamics and fuel economy.
You could even get one with an EPA estimate of 34 MPG on the highway if you chose the di … well, on second thought, do not choose that. Admittedly, that later diesel was a far better motor than its notorious predecessor, but we’re still talking a half-minute zero to sixty time. Cue the Michael Scott “No, dear God no!” meme. Look at that bladder-busting range, though.
A decade and a half later, Chevy gave us a rebodied B-body Caprice for 1991. Gone was the boxy shape, replaced by Shamu-The-Whale-looking “aero” sheet metal that appeared to combine the Ford Taurus with a Motorama show car.
Sales were not nearly as strong as before outside of massive fleet purchases, but at least GM gave us one last hurrah with the blacked-out Impala SS:
The B-body’s new lease on life was short-lived, ending in 1996 to make way for more SUV production. It’s a shame that it never got an opportunity to explore its full potential and give an ill-fated GM brand a truly cool flagship. It seems reader Nick Hernandez feels the same way:
Sure, Nick, let’s make that happen.
Don’t Forget The Winona Judd Concert, Too
General Motors’ work in collaboration with NASA on the Lunar Rover was impressive, but it was nothing next to the moonshot that they tried in the early eighties. Sure, they had kept their head in the sand during the seventies, but by the 1980s it was undeniable that the Japanese onslaught was not going to end unless they put 200 percent tariffs on the cars like, well, they do now with China. The General realized that they had to make a sea change, and the best place to start was with an almost-skunkworks kind of new brand. The first concept was seen in 1984, but it took seven years and five billion dollars for cars to reach showrooms.
Those showrooms, as I’ve indicated in the famous ad before, presented a totally new experience for buyers with no haggling (except on your trade-in) and treating buyers such as young Julie like a princess and not some bottom-feeder loser:
In fact, almost all of the commercials for Saturn showed things like happy workers building the car or owners enjoying barbecues:
You know what was missing in these ads? For the most part, the cars. You barely see them on screen, as it wasn’t deemed important to show them to buyers in a category that generally didn’t care about cars. The whole Saturn buying and ownership experience, in some ways, outweighed the value of the product itself. It’s not that they were horrible products; the styling was nice in a shrunken-Olds kind of way, and they were absolutely better built than the average Cavalier.
However, like I said earlier about products in a certain category, if given the choice between a Saturn SL and a smoother-revving Honda Civic, ultra-high-quality Toyota Corolla, or a deceptively athletic Nissan Sentra, it’s likely that GM’s product would fall to the bottom of the list. There were too many other better selections.
Do you know what you couldn’t get from those imports? An easy-to-maintain, V8-powered sport luxury touring sedan with big tires, brakes, and independent suspension all around for under $40,000 1991 dollars. Now I see where that reader was coming from; I think I’m gonna like the Saturn XL.
A Different Kind Of Caprice
I’m well aware that if the B-Body chassis were a person, it would have been old enough for its driver’s license in 1991. Still, I think we could do some serious work on the chassis to make a rather serious car. General Motors did that themselves with a one-off “Corvette chaser” wagon they built up to keep up with Stingrays on test runs.
I’ve explored this idea before with my Euro-spec turbocharged Caprice idea a few years back:
Inside, bucket seats with a console and extra gauges would have given the ’77 Euro Caprice a more “international” feel.
I’d employ this thinking and a number of the mechanical tricks for the B-Body Saturn XL that I proposed for that concept here as well. The B-Body was great for oozing down the city street or cruising down straight interstates, but cornering and stopping were never strong suits. Brakes would fade into oblivion after one good stop, and just like the Ford Panther, there would be that exit ramp where the live axle would hit that one bump and shift the rear end alarmingly a foot or two sideways. Among those changes would be enormous (for the time at least) Corvette-style tires and wheels, as well as big diameter vented disc brakes on all corners. The biggest modification, of course, would be a bolt-in independent rear setup to replace the four-link live rear axle. I had suggested a C3-style rear suspension for my original Caprice, but I’m sure we could do something updated for 1991.
Combined with tweaks to the front suspension, we’d have a much better ride and handling combination, and a limited-slip differential would help, but down power from the Corvette LT-1. I’d like to pump up the power a bit from the 260 in the Impala SS; closer to 300 with the standard automatic could get the zero to sixty time down to the magical sub-7 second range. At least that’s what you could get with the Saturn XL Red Line model.
For the styling, I kept the windshield and doors of the Caprice essentially the same (just slightly different skins). The nose needed to be extended somewhat to clear the hard points of the radiator and such to give it an SC coupe-style face with retractable headlamps. The filled-in C pillars sit ahead of a very Saturn-looking rear backlight; I’m envisioning a black-painted roof but a body-colored hoop that connects the C pillars. Naturally, I’ve opened up the skirted rear wheel opening, simplified the side trim, and blacked out the chrome.
Here’s an animation between the Caprice and the Saturn XL. You can also see that I reduced rear overhang at the expense of trunk space, but the trade-off would be worth it.
Remember that the flagship SC2 coupe had pop-up headlights? The XL will as well, but since it has twice the number of cylinders, it will naturally have twice as many sealed beam lights.
The rear features low taillights with amber signals since that was a Saturn trademark; prominent quad exhaust tips would be standard on the Red Line and possibly across the board, with the backup lights finishing off the recesses for the pipes. It ended up being kind of a combination of Saturn S- and L-series with some Seville STS in the mix.
Again, you can see how the greenhouse (window area) is pretty much the same, but lopping off some of the rear overhang changes the whole look.
You just know I’m going wild on the inside of this thing. The radio sits in a pod on top of the dash and can be turned to face the driver, the center, or maybe even the passenger (though I would personally NEVER let that happen and would want to have a hidden lockout on the driver’s side). Digital climate controls sit above a typical GM overblown compass and diagnostic display that can pivot up to reveal a hidden storage space underneath.
Yes, we’ve got more pods, people! In 1991, that would have been the last appearance of such things in cars, and the Saturn XL would use them like they were going out of style. I’ve made them sort of “waterfall” into the buttons on the spokes of the steering wheel.
Before you ask, I did try a station wagon version of the XL, but it just didn’t look right. It also looked too much like the Caprice or Roadmaster wagon that it really was and seemed unbefitting of the market position that Saturn would be looking for with the XL. Sure be fun, though.
Forget Memphis, We’re Making A Run To Munich
Like almost everything that I do here at The Autopian, this exercise was done rather tongue-in-cheek with entertainment in mind. Still, the question remains: would anybody have actually wanted what amounted to essentially a thinking person’s Impala SS? The answer is almost certainly not; GM’s experiments with things like turning the Trailblazer into a more highbrow Saab SUV didn’t exactly rush off the showroom floor. Still, the Saturn XL doesn’t look like a Caprice or a Roadmaster, and I can guarantee that with the totally revamped chassis and heated-up motor, it would have been as unrecognizable as the 1976 Seville was to the Nova chassis beneath it, and that sold like hotcakes.
Let’s face it; the big GM B-Bodies and Ford Panthers unarguably have a legacy as some of the greatest American cars ever built. They died out as taxis and cop cars when they should have at least been given just that one chance to get dressed up for the ball to meet up with big S-Class sedans and Rolls-Royce Silver Spirits before the clock struck midnight. Best of all, you wouldn’t even have to haggle at all when buying it.
Top graphic base image: General Motors
I don’t hate it as much as I thought I would but still I could have seen Saturn with the V platform over a B. Basically a Holden or Opel like the Catera was. Maybe with a bit more Saturn. They threw an Opel Astra at Saturn near the end anyway. Something on the V might have resonated with Saturn or would be Saturn buyers over a B body too. Could have been simply called a Saturn V, that would have been very on brand.
I appreciate two things you pointed out here, which those who are determined to view Saturn with rose-tinted glasses forget:
The actual B-body-based car you’ve proposed doesn’t seem like it would have done anything to reverse Saturn’s downward trajectory, but it would certainly be interesting for enthusiasts if it existed now. Like the Sky and Astra and J35-powered Vue Redline.
I’ve said before that GM wasted billions creating the Saturn Corporation. GM’s culture was so toxic and its internal structure so inefficient that it had to spend a large fortune just to get away from itself and spin up a line of mediocre small cars that could barely compete with same-sized Japanese imports. And those cars lost $2,000-$3,000 per unit, even after the exorbitant cost of engineering them.
I’ve also said before that I think GM should have let go of the idea that Cadillac needed to be top dog–especially after it had burned up most of its prestige post-WWII–and built a luxury brand. But the halo car should not have been a B-body. An actual world-class luxury car. Something like the Lexus LS. Even if it cost GM ten times what Toyota spent on Lexus (and it would have), it probably would have paid off better than the dead-end that was Saturn.
Then again, perhaps not. Because part of what made Lexus so successful was that Toyota was able to lean on a number of cheaper-to-make vehicles for actual volume and profit margin, like the ES, SC, GS and later RX, IS, GX, and so on. Some of those were outright JDM Toyota models, while others were principally designed as Lexus models, but could also be sold as premium Toyotas in Japan, where Lexus did not yet exist. What they all had in common, though, was that they were excellently engineered, reliable cars that just needed a little sprucing up to turn them into cars befitting Lexus.
Suppose GM did make a genuinely credible large luxury car on the world stage. What would they have then sold alongside it in the showroom to actually make a profit? Would they have done another couple of unique models? Likely not. That’s exactly what they didn’t do for Saturn. What they would have done is leaned on existing GM engineering for those models, so we would have gotten something like a reskinned Opel (which the L Series actually was) or Saab, or–worse–an N-body or W-body variant. And then whatever goodwill the new company and its halo car made would have been eaten away rather quickly.
The Merkur disaster at ford could be a case study in how it shouldn’t be done.
I was just thinking of that, as soon as I mentioned FoMoCo. I’m not sure why FoMoCo thought its customers so stupid that the products couldn’t be sold as premium Fords (as they were in Germany and the rest of Europe)…and so needed to be sold as a new premium brand called “Merkur” retailed at Lincoln-Mercury dealers.
But truthfully, the cars were probably doomed anyway.
Probably the sales organization wasn’t on board. Toyota and infinity cleaved the upmarket brands from their existing brands and at least Toyota was successful. Fiatsler kept fiats at its main line stores and moved …. not so much product.
Ford was lazy and got what it paid for. I had a Scorpio and it was head and shoulders better than anything Ford, Mercury or Lincoln was offering. The sales people kept pushing a ‘nice’ Lincoln Towncar at me. No thanks. That Scorpio was better than everything the domestics were flogging.
I believe you. That probably doomed the brand more than anything. Whatever intentions Ford had, the dealers were going to undermine it and sell something that they understood better or had more profit in, which was a Lincoln or a Mercury.
Affluent Baby Boomers were avoiding domestic brands like the plague, Ford wanted a European or European-sounding name to appeal to people who wouldn’t be caught dead in something carrying the same nameplate as their elderly father’s Town Car or Grand Marquis. Their initial idea was to try to buy BMW, but the Quandts weren’t interested in selling, so they created their own “fake” German brand as a substitute. When Merkur crashed and burned, Ford then tried to buy Rover Group, which failed because the British government wanted it to stay under domestic ownership and pressured BAe to take it off their hands instead. After that, they mounted a friendly takeover of Jaguar Cars Plc, finally getting the “proper” premium import brand they had wanted all along
Trying to reboot Mercury or Lincoln to appeal to younger buyers was risky, there was a lot of padded vinyl roof and burgundy velour baggage to overcome, and, if it didn’t work, it would have just alienated their existing WWII and Korean War vet customer base, which was still large enough and young enough to buy all the chrome wire wheeled luxoboats Ford could build, so a new import brand was a safer bet, bring in younger buyers with a clean slate, without alienating the customers they already had
The dealership was the killer.
As always, I appreciate the effort, Bishop. I also love the idea of pop-up headlights on a B-body. I do love the reduced rear overhang, as it visually reduces the bulk of the B-body rear end while only shrinking the trunk from “massive” to “huge”. Plus, the C4 wheels looks sweet on the B-bodies, so I’m always down for those.
My one criticism of your design is not with the design itself, but with the reality that GM would have been too cheap to do anything fancy like you have with the C-pillar. Womp womp.
That looks very modern 90s.
I like it.
The European equivalent to an American barge is a Volvo 740/940. Or as I tend to think of them, a Panther done *properly*.
Your Saturn XL is certainly better looking than any of the B-body whales that were actually produced. I like it!
I think the B-body and Panther cars could have been a lot more successful and impactful if they’d been given better styling and more than just engine upgrades. There’s nothing to stop a body-on-frame car being reasonably competitive in terms of comfort, handling and safety…but it requires the automaker to put upgrades into the platform, not just do it on the cheap with the same tech from decades prior.
I also share your opinion that the final B-bodies, in particular, were just ugly.
The investment should have been in making something that wasn’t a throwback to the 60s. ESPECIALLY considering that both GM AND FORD both made pretty damned good actually modern full-size cars – in Oz. Even if exporting them here made no sense, they could have just built them here! There was just no reason to continue with ancient and outdated tech that made it difficult to meet modern safety and ride, handling, and NVH expectations. The bash it into curbs police and taxi fleet market was just not THAT big or profitable.
I’m with you. What they needed was a proper unibody large longitude-RWD platform. It wasn’t going to happen, but I’m with you.
I mean, Ford had that with the MN12 platform that underpinned the Thunderbird and Cougar (and in enlarged form the Mark VIII), but that one was famously overbudget. Ford also had the DEW platform, and they could have used that to a greater extent than they did.
But the thing is – BOTH companies already had those platforms! The Holden Commodore and the Ford Falcon from Down Under! GM made their half-assed attempt to sell them here, but Ford never bothered. Both should have been built here and replaced those antediluvian arks. In GM’s case, spending more than $.25 per car on the interior materials would have been a big help – but that was just standard GM of the time. I can’t say I have ever so much as laid eyes on a Falcon, but Euro Fords generally have decent interiors, so I imagine Oz Fords did too.
They also solved the problem of both Panthers (at least the regular wheelbase ones) and B-bodies being hilariously huge on the outside but really rather cramped on the inside relative to their size. The biggest issue with BoF construction is that ineffient space utilization. Solved in pickup trucks by making them the size of aircraft carriers so it doesn’t matter.
True. I really think they needed to be able to make the cars here in North America in order to really make the numbers shake out. For Ford, who was already making MN12 and DEW cars here, that was doable. For GM, who wasn’t, not so much.
The Aussie-imported ones were never viable long-term solutions because of the costs.
My grandma still has a 2002ish Grand Marquis, which she’s had since it was a couple years old. I remember going on a vacation with my family and receiving a nearly new Grand Marquis as a rental, this would have been 2011. It was identical to my grandma’s, inside and out. No effort made to modernize or update anything at all. And the Grand Marquis wasn’t exactly modern looking in 2002, I was only nine then and even I remember that. My dad took it back and exchanged it for a Cadillac ATS.
They still looked the same, but there were some significant chassis and steering changes in 2003.
I had a coworker who was voted most boring woman in the world. Classic spinster.
She bought a Saturn when they first came out. They even featured her in one of their ads. Apparently they didn’t like it when she referred to it as the “plastic chevy”.
For every bum there’s a seat.
Saturn people were largely not car people, and definitely cared more about the culture and experience surrounding the cars than the cars themselves. And most of them didn’t know Saturn had anything to do with GM.
All that is to say that I’m surprised this woman had the awareness to call her car the “plastic chevy.” And also that she was both correct and incorrect. The early Saturn cars had nothing to do with Chevrolets engineering wise, but were affiliated with Chevrolet in the corporate sense, and weren’t all that much better than Chevrolets.
I still stick by my pronouncement that Saturn should have become the GM EV brand. People interested in EVs are the type that would never thing to set foot in a Chevy dealer, and most of the staff at a Chevy dealer really doesn’t want to bother to try to sell you anything other than a truck anyway.
There was no reason to keep Saturn around just for that. GM got rid of it just as soon as it could (the bankruptcy/restructuring) and wisely so.
Now, if Saturn had already been making a line of actually-competent hybrids and EVs ahead of that point, during the 90s and aughts, Saturn might have had enough brand equity to survive into the future as GM’s alternative fuel/tech brand…but all Saturn really had was the long-gone EV-1 that had been retailed at its dealerships (while carrying “GM” branding) and a line of mild hybrids that didn’t make too much of a splash.
As it was, the 2010s+ EVs and hybrids did about as well under Chevy as they would have under Saturn.
Gotta get them plastic door panels on there to resist those shopping cart attacks.
The “big brother” of Saturn was always meant to be Oldsmobile. Saturn stayed on the smaller/low end of the market, while Oldsmobile was the full-line division that concentrated more on the mid and large size cars that were a step up from Chevy. Even their styling was fairly similar with a grill-less front end on their later models.
After Oldsmobile was killed off, it did seem like GM was trying to subtly move Saturn upmarket a bit into roughly the space Olds had occupied, ca mid-late ’00s. The mission seemed to become similar, since they had previously attempted to reposition Olds as a premium import fighter in the 1990s, leaving the traditional comfort-oriented business to Buick, but that hadn’t worked. Though, one of the reasons Oldsmobile was dropped instead of any other brand, including Saturn, was that they had very few single-brand franchises by the end, so GM didn’t have to spend as much when buying out dealers. A shutdown of a different brand with more stand-alone showrooms was too costly outside of a bankruptcy filing
I have to think you’re correct. Oldsmobile was probably the easiest brand to kill off.
I do guess that GM wanted to kill off Saturn probably as early as 1998. GM’s attempt to conquer or at least gain a reasonable foothold in the import space by throwing an fortune at a line of low-margin, low-price cars hadn’t worked (because of course it didn’t). The cars were still losing a few thousand per unit at that time in absolute dollars, and now Saturn needed more money to develop a fuller line of its unique cars? No chance.
And that’s when Saturn started to get corporate engineering and was later outright folded into the rest of GM, its special agreement with the UAW dissolved and its plant in Tennessee reassigned as GM Spring Hill. At that point, GM was struggling to figure out what to do with Saturn, because it really just became another dealer network to sate with specific product, so trying to move it into a quasi-import, nicer-than-Chevy space that was formerly held by Oldsmobile made some sense, for lack of any other way to deal with an unwanted brand.
GM’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy gave the company the excuse and the means to shed Saturn, and it jumped on that opportunity. Frankly, I’m not even sure GM really made a good faith effort to sell Saturn to Penske, nor did that seem like a particularly viable idea in the first place.
Honestly imo they should have killed off everything but Chevrolet and Cadillac. culled 95% of management from middle through board. Then pivoted to building a Toyota and Lexus level portfolio with Toyota and Lexus levels of quality. Gm has the engineering and design chops.
That was more of a fluke than anything. Saturn Corporation really was spun up as a separate entity, and wasn’t supposed to have much of anything in common with other GM divisions. It also wasn’t meant to fit inside the existing GM hierarchy, which had already begun to collapse anyhow. That Saturn’s first car ended up looking rather like a shrunken version of Oldsmobile’s W-body Cutlass and that both brands converged upon a similar front fascia design language spoke more to GM’s inability to escape itself no matter how much money was spent.
But at the beginning, there was no deliberate effort to make Saturn the junior to Oldsmobile. In fact, to do so would have been counterintuitive. GM was just that helpless. Nevertheless, it didn’t seem to faze too many people, because (a) information wasn’t as readily available as it is now and so many people really didn’t know Saturn was GM, and (b) the demographic that Saturn was targeting really didn’t care too much about cars or their provenance in the first place.
When designing a Saturn for the early 90s; remember that it has the front of a Citroen SM and the body of a Chevy Lumina.
And the interior is an American take on an 80s Honda Civic.
That is the best description of a Saturn I have ever seen.
It sure is, and it’s exactly what I tried to do!
Thanks! I owned a 94 SL2 for years, drove it well after the odometer stopped turning at 340k.
Especially that last part. In typical GM fashion at the time, the car they were benchmarking at the start of development was a couple generations past that by the time the GM product debuted.
Give The Bishop a raise right now. The assignment was understood.
As one who owned multiple Saturns and whose family owned several more, I both love and hate this design. It tracks, but is still kinda ugly but in the right way that actual Saturns are kinda ugly. Why does it have such a pointy nose? Because it can.
A defining feature of my Saturn experience was the single, integrated turn signal/windshield wiper stalk that is too small™, so I think the dual control knobs/pods don’t fit for me. There should only be one and it should be a little awkward like the tiny stalk I’m used to.
Thanks! Yeah, I wasn’t conceptualizing for me, it was for the Saturn buyer of 1991 that got a big promotion at work.
if they could have somehow made a holden AWD Commodore and imported it without a huge tariff, I would have been interested. less competition for the outgoing RWD big cars, and an inbetweener for those not quite enamored with the big SUV craze of the times.
Even at the time, and not counting hindsight, nothing about having a big boat-y American car with a V8 would ever had made sense for Saturn.
Saturn needed less badge-engineering, not more.
Especially hilarious were the Saturn-Opels…
I feel a pretty major aspect of the early part of Saturn’s success (and it’s subsequent implosion when GM started rebading Opels) was because it was anti-establishment; even beyond the point that it actively caused problems (reusing the horrible Opel V6 just because it was different from anything sold in US GM models). You’re buying an American car, but it’s different.
A B-Body is about as establishment GM a car could have possibly been in the early 90s. It would have been catastrophic, both in individual sales as well as to perception of the brand itself.
Pretty sure Opel was actually a German car company originally and as such none of them were close to American cars. That would be e like comparing Holden to Chevrolet
That would be broadly true of the S Series cars. They had their own unique everything, and were built at the Saturn Plant in Spring Hill, TN. But the reason the L Series got the Opel V6 is because it was an Opel. It was an Opel Vectra. To Saturn’s credit, the company did re-body the car using Saturn’s polycarbonate-over-spaceframe arrangement and did redesign the interior and exterior. But it was an Opel, built at a corporate GM factory in Wilmington, DE. So the Opel V6 was already compatible.
It’s the same reason other Opel-based products, like the Saabs and the Cadillac Catera, got that engine. Opel also had a major hand in developing the Theta platform that underpinned the Vue, which is in part why the Vue also got that engine.
It was also about the only non-OHV V6 GM had at the time, so it helped “keep up appearances” with a DOHC engine for the “import fighting” brand (until the later Saturns that offered the High Value engines).
They had the 3.5 “Shortstar,” but I can’t imagine as a 90-degree engine it would have fit in the smaller L or VUE and it was also clear GM was letting that engine die with the Oldsmobile brand.
Right. Plus, the Shortstar was a premium engine.
Back in the 1990s, what Saturn REALLY needed was a small or mid sized SUV… with their own versions of the 2 door and 4 door Suzuki Sidekick/Vitara.
And a minivan would have fit the brand well too. And for that, they could have partnered with Nissan and got a version of the Axxess/Prairie
I recall they had a version of the dust buster vans.
It’s a good thing they folded. If they were still around today, they’d be making full sized pickups. :EYEROLL:
Kinda.
For one, I think GM knew better than to make Saturn another captive import brand. They already had Geo for that (and would have the short-lived Asüna in Canada). Besides, those sorts of agreements are tricky and sometimes only make sense for as long as there are synergies or ownership structures between the donor and recipient companies. They are also usually used to fill holes in an existing brand’s lineup and don’t justify spinning up a whole new brand and certainly not a new dealer network, as Saturn did. The reason Mercury had the Villager (a Nissan Quest by another name) was because FoMoCo needed a minivan for Lincoln/Mercury dealers that was nicer than and different from Ford’s own Windstar…not because FoMoCo wanted to use it as the basis for a new brand.
So the notion of using a Suzuki or Nissan as a basis is a no-go.
The time for Saturn to ideally present crossovers—and when they would have been most impactful because no one else had them—was when Saturn was releasing its first cars. That was when GM was just throwing hordes of cash at the project and when the resource allocation to such an undertaking would have been most viable. So let’s say, charitably, 1986. Problem is, there wasn’t really a template for them. You had stuff like the AMC Eagle and the XJ Cherokee, but those weren’t really crossovers in the traditional sense. They happened to be unibody, but they had very traditional-SUV characteristics, including solid axles and longitude-RWD drivetrains.
Beyond those, the cars that define the modern transverse-FWD, mass-market crossover, the Toyota RAV4 and Honda CR-V, began development in the early 1990s. The Lexus RX 300, which was a premium take on that…began development in or around 1994. I doubt GM or even Saturn itself would have been forward-thinking enough to come up with cars like those. Saturn was too busy trying to distinguish the construction of its cars (plastic-over-steel-space-frame) to step back and think of introducing a new form factor.
And by the time the crossover emerged as massively successful in the late 90s and Saturn would have thought to make one, Daddy GM was tightening the budget. Saturn wasn’t going to get a giant budget to develop its future cars, which meant something as groundbreaking as a crossover wasn’t going to happen that early.
That said, Saturn did get on the crossover train pretty early with the Vue, which debuted in 2002. It used corporate engineering that was eventually shared with cars like the Equinox, Torrent, SRX 9-4X, etc…but was still built at the Saturn plant and still had the Saturn plastic body panels. And it was pretty successful.
There already was a Saturn full-size sedan.
It was called the Oldsmobile Aurora.
I agree, but I was just doing what was asked of me. Humble servant and all…
Here’s a challenge for you then:
I’ve long said that Buick should have come out with a lineup of EVs, called “Electra”, as in “Lacrosse Electra”, “Century Electra”, “Regal Electra”, etc.
So take some SAIC/Wuling EVs and make them “Buick Electras”
How about a Carmen Electra?
She’s already redesigned herself.
Humble? Yeah right
I dunno. This seems waaaaay out if the Saturn market.
Now, if you made it a Pontiac, which also did not get a B body, now we’re talkin’!!
And call it the Pontiac LeMans.
Sorry that name is already taken up by the Daewoo Nexia.
Pontiac had the B-body, the Bonneville and later Parisianne.
No final gen B-body, anyway. Pontiac had the full range from 1977-1984, then intended to carry on with only the Safari wagon in the US (since the new FWD models didn’t have the towing capacity), before hastily introducing the previously Canadian-only Parisienne in the US when dealers complained loudly enough about losing their RWD large sedans. Pontiac was considered for a new B-body in the early ’90s, but I believe it was division management that decided not to participate in the program, while Oldsmobile chose to sell only the wagon and no sedan version
I don’t care how compromised its’ looks had to be, I’ll take a wagon, because wagon with pop-up headlights.
And presumably it’d have the Vista Cruiser fixed glass roof over the second row the Oldsmobuicks had.
The sky bubble would be a non negotiable
The Olds was easily the most attractive of the bubble generation, although I could settle for an SS, or Roadmaster w vinyl wood.
In the immortal words of Archer – “I can only get so erect”. 🙂 I’d hit that! I have a soft spot for B-body wagons, though I infinitely prefer the square ones, not the whales.
I seem to remember a short tall baby wagon before the SUV craze that would have fit Saturn to a tee but can’t find it on the interwebs
I’m seeing a lot of Oldsmobile Aurora. Which, come to think of it, might have made a pretty good Saturn.
Love the interior pods Bishop, esp. for the channeling of what GM was trying to achieve back then. My Beretta had the rotary dials, just higher/on the gauge pod itself. I liked them, even if it was a little of an odd reach from the wheel itself.
This absolutely would’ve been one of the most sought after GM cars of its day. A 4-door Corvette, with hassle free sales and a college graduate sort of sensibility. Magazines would’ve compared it to the LS400. Pontiac and Oldsmobile would be fuming that the new kid got the funwagon. I imagine there’d be a concerted effort to get the Bonneville and Ninety-Eight on the platform. I want one.
Doubt it.
I didn’t say favorably.
In my 20s, a lot of my friends were buying new Saturns. Some of them were buying 2 new Saturns for each of the married couple.
They were buying the no haggle dealership, non rusting body panels, and promise of basic transportation.
I am always amused when cornering g’s on the skidpad are used to describe handling or cornering characteristics of a car.
However I am now intrigued by the 1977 Euro Turbo Caprice…
You mean the 911 doesn’t handle the same as a Caprice? How can that be??
The Chevy uses imperial g’s and the Porsche uses metric g’s, so it’s not really the same number.
So Chevy is the the empire and Porsche is the resistance? That doesn’t seem right.
I don’t think anyone would be looking for an upscale Saturn. The best version of what is described would be the G8.
Yeah it would be like looking for an upscale VW. OH WAIT THEY HAVE THOSE
Sorta looks like a Chrysler Concorde and a Saturn had sex and this was their offspring.
I dig that.
Lol, and my uncle owned one of those “Cab Forward” cars and owned one too.
We’re related?
Just slap a Saturn logo on the Aurora. It never should have been an Oldsmobile.