SW17LS

What Saturn showed was that the product itself isn't really as important as the experience the buyer has when buying and owning it. Saturn was a great company to buy and own a car from, but the car itself was very mediocre. You had economy car customers being treated like luxury car customers, of course they were happy, and by and large they didnt care about the car's attributes so they were happy.

mmarshall

Olds, IMO, lost its identity (and really went downhill) when they dumped the Ninety-Eight and Eighty-Eight (their two staples after the popular RWD Cutlasses were discontinued), and turned to new designs like the Aurora and Alero. They did to themselves, by dumping these two stapes, what Saturn did by dumping the S-series.

Buick, BTW, probably benefited the most from the demise of Olds....and also from Ford's dumping of Mercury. Being one of their former competitors, that's division that Olds and Mercury customers naturally gravitated to.....if they didn't choose a foreign make instead.

Pontiac's story is more complex. It generally appealed to a different, more performance-oriented set of customers than Olds or Buick, and, unlike Olds, had marketed an excellent pair of Holden-Australian-designed products in the G8 and GTO, which, despite their excellence, simply did not sell well in the U.S. The GTO was criticized for looking too much like a rental car.....I strongly disagreed, as, style-wise, it had strong links to the original ones of the 1960s. But the rest of the division had been seriously neglected. The G6 had the only reasonably-priced, reasonably-sized convertible/retracting hard-top that could compete with the popular Chrysler Lebaron/Sebring convertibles, but the cheapness and crap-interiors of the G6, IMO, were a joke...as was that of the smaller less-expensive G5. They tried to (false-advertise) the Montana minivan as a tough, off-road ranching vehicle (remember those cowboy TV commercials)?....which turned out to be a flop.



Saab, before its GM-ownership-days, might had what could be considered a "cult" (although a rather small one) when they sold the quirky Swedish-designed 99 and 900.....one of my supervisors, at work, was of Swedish descent and liked them. But GM did to Saab essentially what it did to the second decade of Saturn....tried to make it a division of redesigned Opels, GM products, and a rebadged Subaru Impreza (9-2X). Little wonder it didn't work, either.

I remember when I did a full-review and write-up on a Saab 9-3 Combi wagon. There was only one local Saab dealer in the area, and I dont think I ever saw a dealership where the staff themselves took more lethargic attitude towards their products or their business. They all seemed to know or sense, subconsciously, that they weren't even a needle in a haystack, and that they were being swallowed up by the Toyota/Honda/Ford/Chevy, etc.... dealerships around them that were grabbing all of the customers.

tex2670

Yeah, GM did it's best job destroying Saab while it could; that just means some Saab customers started missing Saab even before it was shut down. LOL

But I just was talking to someone yesterday that had a GM era 9/3 sedan, and she loved that car.

GS69

https://jalopnik.com/sign-toting-eva...ema-1847357485

Sign-Toting Evangelists Show Up To GM Headquarters Demanding The Revival Of The Saturn Brand

The protest was organized by Detroiter Andy Didorosi

By
Bradley Brownell
Yesterday 12:46PM
Comments (140)
Alerts Screenshot: Fox 2 DetroitOver the weekend dozens of Saturn fans showed up to the streets outside of General Motors’ Detroit headquarters, the Renaissance Center, to demand the company bring back plastic cars and no-haggle dealerships.

Saturn died in October of 2010 after just 25 years of production. While General Motors didn’t officially respond to the protest, and likely won’t be bringing Saturn back any time soon, the group of wacky fans announced they were taking their rally on to several other (not at all Saturn-related) cities.

If you don’t live in Detroit, you might not know the name of former Jalopnik intern Andy Didorosi, and you might not have heard of the Detroit Bus Company. Thankfully the folks “organizing” the 24-Hours-of-Lemons offshoot Lemons Rally had heard of him, and called him up to get a real taste of what it’s like to visit Detroit. The Lemons Rally participants were treated to a bus tour of awesome sites and cool activities, such as a long-drive competition (hitting random nuts and bolts with thrift shop golf clubs) on the grounds of the long-defunct AMC headquarters, or visiting the 52-year-0ld concrete velodrome where Didorosi and co. once hosted small-bore motorcycle racing.

The final stop on the tour, as you can guess, was a visit to the RenCen. The Lemons Rally folks and the Detroit Bus Company folks threw this wild idea together the night before, and told everyone involved to whip together some signs in support of Saturn. While everyone was writing out “We need cheap ****boxes again. I want to be able to afford a car, damn it!! We need Saturn!” in magic marker on plain white poster board, Didorosi was calling the local news stations.

Andy told anyone who would take his call that two bus-loads of people, including some from as far away as Florida, were showing up to GM’s doorstep to shout about a brand that has been dead for eleven years. Not a word of that was a lie, but the local stations seemingly didn’t realize the whole thing was kind of a joke—not that that the LeMons Rally people would necessarily be opposed to a Saturn revival.
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Large crowd protests for GM to bring back the Saturn car brand in front of Ren Cen

Hundreds of people from around the country gathered at GM HQ to protest the car maker for ending…

Read moreAccording to Lemons staffer Eric Rood, one of the participants even told the news crews in attendance that the whole thing was a stunt for “Lemons Rally” and they replied with something like “Yeah, I know this is a protest rally.” Of course, that just made the jape all the more delicious.

There’s perhaps nothing more Detroit than forming a picket line to fight for something you believe in. Of course it’s usually fair wages or better treatment of factory workers, you know, stuff that matters. This was nothing more than a ruse that made the evening news, everyone there knew that their words would carry no weight. In any case, it would seem that Didorosi gave the Lemons Rally participants a taste of the Detroit experience they were looking for.

Image: Eric RoodThere was even a Saturn entrant on the rally’s aptly-named Rust Belt Ramble. This mid-2000s Ion was stripped of its plastic panels and given a slew of trailer lights and a NASA logo in an effort to mimic some kind of lunar rover. It’s just weird enough to be perfectly at home on the Lemons Rally. And of course, we have been familiar with Lemons Rally since the beginning.

mmarshall

No, but I certainly won't shed any tears if these people succeed. It would also be nice to have a small plastic-bodied Saturn crossover, with a true Saturn drivetrain and spin-off transmission filter like the S-series had. I'd seriously look at one....and possibly take one home.

There are also some (conflicting) signs that this "protest" may be at least partly fake.

SW17LS

Literally no one considers the type of transmission filter a car has lol

mmarshall

No. The Saturn S-Series spin-off tranny filter was anything BUT an LOL. It made transmission-service a piece of cake, both for Technicians and DIY'ers at home. Drain old fluid out the plug, unscrew the filter, remove the small magnets from the filter (which hold iron-based metal shavings from transmission-wear), wash off the magnets, place them in the new filter, screw the new filter back on, replace drain-plug, fill tranny fluid to proper level, and Bingo......you're ready to roll.

That's part of what is wrong with a lot of today's transmissions. Not only do they lack ingenious devices like this, but some of them are sealed for life...you can't even change the fluid. And that's one reason why so many of them are having problems.

SW17LS

Literally nobody even thinks about the process to service their transmission lol. It’s just a non factor for 99.99% of car buyers.

And please point us to the “many transmissions that are having problems”. Transmissions are more reliable than they have ever been. You’re again living in another era.

mmarshall

The more complex they make today's trannies, and the less they allow for regular fluid-changes, the more problems (and potential problems) they run into. GM and Ford, in particular, have seen an increase in transmission issues since giving up the former 4 and 6-speed units for 8, 9, and 10-speed units. The ZF 9-speed that FCA and Honda/Acura uses has also had a lot of issues, and customer complaints.

SW17LS

Please provide a source for this. I don’t buy it at all.

The issues with the ZF units and high speed units has nothing to do with maintenance, it’s design and buyers being unhappy with the shift logic. You made a statement that modern transmissions are less reliable because of more difficult maintenance and that’s just not true at all.

mmarshall

CL had a thread on this subject several years ago.

https://www.clublexus.com/forums/es-...liability.html

Australian auto expert John Cadogan also gives his view of sealed-transmissions, though he uses somewhat stronger language than I would....I don't like to use four-letter words.

https://autoexpert.com.au/posts/seal...-transmissions

tex2670

I don't know a single person who would know how to change a transmission filter. My neighbor was REALLY impressed I knew how to fill my washer fluid.

UDel

It was not from failures or mechanical issues, it was mainly from programming and gear hunting/wrong gear chosen especially when driving cars more aggressively and was mostly fixed after the first year or two with software updates.

SW17LS

None of this is proof that modern transmissions are less reliable than older transmissions because of reduced maintenance requirements.

As technology improves, lubricants improve, design improves, mechanical things need LESS maintenance. This is a good thing for consumers because maintenance is costly and cumbersome.

But, guess what...people who make money maintaining your car don't want less required maintenance, they want more because that financially benefits them

LeX2K

But I can put the improved lubricants in my old transmission.

My take, apples to apples meaning no maintenance a modern transmission will probably last longer. With maintenance, I can make an old Aisin tranny go 500,000 miles that ain't gonna happen with a sealed transmission.