Saturn Would Have Been The Best Launch Brand For The Controversial GM ‘Dustbuster’ Vans

In the eighties, Ford and General Motors reluctantly ceded the minivan crown to the revived Chrysler corporation. To their credit, the Aerostar and Astro, Ford and GM’s body-on-frame, rear-drive variations on the minivan formula, could tow more. But the vast majority of families never, ever hook up a trailer of any kind to their minivans, and Chrysler was simply running away with the category. With the popularity of the car-based Dodge Caravan taking a big bite out GM’s bottom line, The General finally decided to finally strike back with a new and dramatic front-drive design.

GM’s would-be Caravan-killer arrived in 1990 as Pontiac, Chevrolet, and Oldsmobile dealers took delivery of minivans that looked like nothing else on the market. Styling details varied to suit each brand, but all featured the same sleek profile, a futuristic shape that would look just as appropriate delivering James T. Kirk and his crew to the Enterprise in the 23rd century as it would delivering Jane Kirk and her family to an amusement park in the 20th. Or so GM hoped; it turned out the Van Of Tomorrow resonated more as the Handheld Vacuum Of Today, and GM’s great hope was quickly saddled with the nickname Dustbuster. Because it looked like a Dustbuster.

Recently, reader CalLook67 asked what it might be like if a “Different Kind of Car Company” had sold this van instead; could Saturn have had more success with a “different kind of buyer”?

A Van-Detta On The Voyager

I was told that when one of my creative director bosses saw his first Pontiac Trans Sport van parked outside of our office window, his immediate response was, “Well, there’s a battle that the design department won.” He was sort of right, but not entirely.

The first manifestation of GM’s minivan vision was the 1986 Pontiac Trans Sport show vehicle. With a gullwing rear side door and wraparound glass and an interior loaded with state-of-the-art technology (for the time) including a digital rear view mirror, heads-up display, and a primitive version of what would eventually become OnStar. There was even a Nintendo game system for the rear seats.

The Trans Sport show car was reportedly based on the A-Body Pontiac 6000 chassis, yet the long wheelbase and short overhangs were nothing like that car; indeed, they were closer to the proportions of the later, famously mid-engined Toyota Previa. Had the Trans Sport reached showrooms, it would have immediately made all the other minivans on the market look at least a decade old.

Four years later, the production Pontiac Trans Sport was traffic-stopping; you didn’t need a wind tunnel to tell you that it was the most aerodynamic minivan available at the time.

Despite the slick looks, a Trans Sport was a highly practical, spacious minivan with reconfigurable seating inside for up to seven.

This radical van was joined with the more basic Chevrolet Lumina Van variant and the luxury-oriented Oldsmobile Silhouette version.

A few years later, the Olds version was the first minivan with an electric sliding door, a feature memorably immortalized on film in Get Shorty.

Why didn’t the production van have quite the same feel as that concept? Well, we all know what happens with concept cars; once they reach production, a drastic number of things change for the sake of cost, complexity, and practicality, and often for the worse. Like the Trans Sport show car, the production edition was based on that Pontiac 6000 wagon platform, but the proportions were far, far closer to the donor car than what was displayed years before at the Chicago Auto Show.

Front and rear overhangs were longer, and the driver and front passenger sat almost in the same location as the normal 6000. That car obviously sported a rather normal windshield and traditional hood, so to replicate the show car’s styling, the production Trans Sport had deeply raked front glass, necessitating an incredibly deep dashboard. The extra dash area came at the expense of the hood, and the short lid that remained left far less space for engine access than the 6000’s “regular” proportions. And then there’s the view from behind the wheel; if you can imagine driving a normal sedan or wagon with two-by-fours going from the top of the windshield sides down to the ends of the front fenders, that’s essentially what you saw from the Trans Sport’s driver’s seat.

Note also the deeply raked shut line at the back of the front doors. It created a dangerously sharp point at the back top corner, so concerning that a warning label urged you not to spike yourself on it – which you probably read only after discovering on your own why GM put a sticker on there, as you rubbed a hot welt on your forehead.

Despite these idiosyncrasies, the Trans Sport’s futuristic “Dustbuster” wedge did manage to break out of the typical minivan mold; it was deserving of a brand that did that same thing.

Cybertruck Fans Don’t Even Get Hootie

Enthusiast cults exist around scores of cars, from two-cylinder air-cooled French sedans that look like ducks, all the way up to stainless steel-clad electric pickup trucks. While virtually all of these cults spring up from admirers who can spend hours boring you with the unique traits of the product they connect over, the cult of GM’s Saturn was very different. In many cases, these Saturn faithfuls were there for the purchase and ownership experience, and they didn’t really care nearly as much about their car itself.

As Thomas has written about before, the clean-sheet-of-paper manufacturing process of developed for early Saturns resulted in a happy workforce that created much higher quality cars than GM had been known for at the time of the brand’s launch in 1990. It was almost a standalone product where the lineup of sedans, coupes, and wagons didn’t play the typical GM game of sharing ninety percent of the car’s parts with other nameplates.

Certainly, these Saturns were much better built than a Cavalier of the same vintage, but they were still somewhat lacking when compared to concurrent offerings from Japan. When revved, the engines (particularly the twin-cam version) didn’t create the symphonic sounds of a refined Civic. The chassis couldn’t match the BMW 2002-like Nissan Sentra, and the build quality was well behind a Corolla like the ’91 model that drove past me on the road today (the windows were up in 95-degree heat, so the 34-year-old air conditioning was likely still working).

Sure, but could Toyota give you a pioneering purchase experience? No pushy salespeople, plus there was zero haggling, so everyone got ripped off equally. Here’s a commercial I’ve shown before that really sums up the whole gestalt of Saturness:

I bet Julie was going to airports and handing out Saturn leaflets with other cult members in a week or two. It’s almost certain that she would have attended the Saturn Homecoming event to hear Winona Judd perform to 22,000 other owners.

Such different thinking of the assembly and sales process didn’t really extend to the brand’s vehicles, though. Other than the dent-resistant Fiero-style plastic body panels, initial Saturn cars were painfully conventional in design and appearance. With such an unorthodox brand identity, it’s a shame that GM didn’t take advantage of using it to launch one of their equally game-changing, cutting-edge products. Let’s follow CalLook67’s suggestion that they actually did.

Bustin’ The Dustusbter

What’s to hate about a wedge? Nothing, if you ask me. However, slap a bunch of late eighties Pontiac wings and bumpy side trim, and anything is gonna look like, well, you in those parachute pants back in the day (we have photos, so don’t deny it). If we remove much of this cladding from the Pontiac or the standard black striping of the Silhouette and keep the purity of the GM “Dustbuster” shape, I bet it wouldn’t be an object of quite as much derision.

Here’s another thing: when we overlay the sharply raked nose design of the early Saturn models onto the front of the GM WedgeVan, the look is rather appealing. Honestly, it makes the front-end options of the other brands with Pontiac nostrils or the rather upright wraparound headlamps seem out of place.

Here you can see what we’d call the Saturn SV2 animated between the standard Pontiac Trans Sport. Note that I’ve also added taillights (or at least reflectors) that continue the taillights down to the bumper in a style later done by Volvo and current Cadillac SUVs:

How about we push it a bit more? Like, make a van that you’d buy because you want it, not because you’re forced to? Let’s make an open van to let the sun in. Fabric sunroofs are always a disaster, and sliding multi-panel affairs as on some later Pontiacs aren’t much better, so I propose that American Sunroof Corporation (ASC) could have offered retractable roof panels for an SV2 Sky. There would be one over the front seats and a second over the center row.

The signature “basket handle” of the Trans Sport would stay to keep rigidity. Mechanical arms would lift the panels, fold them over on themselves, and angle the collapsed roof to act as a big rear spoiler of sorts. The rear side windows can roll down as well.

We’ll take advantage of these years before the final round of safety regulations to put seatbelts onto the center row captains’ chairs, allowing them to rotate around 180 degrees as on our famous Autopian Rodius. Now you’ve got a nice conversation area, or can tend to kids strapped in the third row; I am hesitant to put a motorhome-style table in between the seats for safety but we could offer a fold-down table to go between the captains chairs that might be able to also act as a central third seat to give eight passenger capacity.

Also, between the front seats could be a drinks cooler that takes in air from a floor-mounted A/C vent. You could also carry it Aztek-style or put it onto a wheeled base with a telescopic handle. What a great way to enjoy the Saturn Reunion! Think about it; retract the roof panels, face the rear seats at each other, and chill out with cold beverages in the parking area with other Saturn lovers.

Then, when the Hootie and the Blowfish concert is about to start (they performed at the 1999 Saturn Homecoming event), just pull the drinks cooler along, and even let your youngest kid ride on top. That’s some family fun there!

A Different Kind Of Van

But wait! Saturn did propose a sort-of-minivan concept in 2000. The CV-1 was a crossover-looking subcompact people mover with twin sunroofs and rear-facing “center row” jump seats.

The bizarre bi-fold doors on the side allowed access to either the jump seat second row or the rearmost third row, but not at the same time.

There’s definitely some unique thinking there, but the tiny size seems more suited to countries where they don’t sell Big Gulps and Baconaters. I certainly think that our Saturn SV2 “Dustbuster” concept might be far better suited for Saturn and people who knew they needed a van but wanted something cool.

General Motors eventually gave up on its futuristic vans after the 1996 model year, replacing them with far more traditional-looking boxy models. Even stranger is that when minivans started to fall out of favor, GM took this second-generation model and added a long nose in an attempt to pass as a sort-of SUV. When Saturn finally got a minivan, it was sadly a strange concoction named the Relay. Talk about a case of too little, too late to save the General’s attempt at a popular minivan and the Saturn brand itself from its untimely demise in 2010.

This “Different Kind of Car Company” just didn’t offer products that were different enough in the right kinds of ways, but maybe they could have been the right home for the Dustbuster: a truly unique and underappreciated vision of a family hauler.

Saturn owners of the time probably would have accepted almost anything that the brand released; why couldn’t GM have rewarded such loyalty and acceptance of new automotive ideas with a product many buyers missed out on because they were too closed-minded? At the same time, it might have brought some new people to the Saturn family who just liked the van and then discovered how a car ownership experience could be something far better than they ever imagined.

We’ll never know. Thanks for the suggestion, CalLook67!