Road Test
The "different kind of company with a different kind of car" that General Motors launched in 1990 with a $3 billion shower of cash and a sickly sweet marketing campaign soon became the same old company selling last year's car. A decade slipped away before Saturn produced a second product line, the lackluster L-series. The subsequent Vue and Ion have only smoldered, and the division's engineering and marketing bureaus, once independent, have been fully absorbed into the monolithic mother ship. The revolutionary notions that were espoused in the glowing Hal Riney ads - a separate company within GM of eager young minds, the teaming of disputatious labor and management, the one-price dealers - wound up feeling mostly like missed opportunities.
Here comes the 2007 Saturn Sky, and with it, Saturn's long-foretold revival goes back onto the front burner. The Sky arrives not a minute too soon. Although GM appeared to give up on Saturn, the division's dealers - who are generally liked by customers, or at least those filling out J.D. Power and Associates dealer-satisfaction surveys, where Saturn consistently rates with Toyota, Honda, and even Lexus - didn't give up. The dealers moved 213,657 Saturns in 2005 against competitors with better reputations and better cars with better resale values.
And now GM is taking a renewed interest in its giant ball of gas. Saturn, the official transportation of coupon-clipping pensioners and unemployed psych majors, will become a distribution network for urbane Opels from the Continent. Saturn never saw the sun shining so bright, never saw things goin' so right.
At least, that's the giddy feeling people get when first gazing at the Saturn Sky. After they ask who makes it. After we respond. And after they say, "Really? Saturn?"
It's true. GM product czar Bob Lutz smote the earth and up sprang the pipsqueak Kappa platform, a fascinating potpourri of hydroformed steel tubes and stampings, aluminum control arms, and GM-parts-bin bits. The Kappa is now experiencing cell mitosis. First it sired the Pontiac Solstice roadster (December 2005), and now it gives life to a Saturn cub-Vette. The Sky, assembled alongside the Solstice in Wilmington, Delaware, is 3.9 inches longer than the Pontiac but otherwise virtually identical dimensionally. It is the Sky that will sell in Europe as the Opel GT, having been styled in GM's Coventry, England, studios by Simon Cox, the chief artiste behind Cadillac's 2001 Cien show car.
The Sky takes up where the Solstice's clean, orbicular shape leaves off. Extra design trinkets include forward-canted side vents, faux hood vents, multiple grille openings with dashes of chrome, and a rear undertray with incorporated backup light. The headlights and the taillights are busied with proliferating lenses - the Sky has projector-beam headlamps, the Solstice doesn't - and chrome spears. The lonely "Sky" badge adrift on the rump looks like an afterthought. Why couldn't it have been neatly embossed on the bumper?
If the Solstice strikes you as too unorthodox, too unembellished and original to be a GM design, the Sky is happy to restore your sense of normality.
Saturn intends the Sky to rise above the Solstice (don't worry, the next cars, the Galileo and the Kepler, will explain everything), in that the Sky's base price of $23,690 is $3200 higher than the stripper Solstice's. The extra nip gets you air conditioning, ABS, cruise, power everything (except the top, which is manual in all Kappas), keyless entry, floor mats, an alarm, and OnStar for a year. Taken together these options cost $3355 on the Solstice, which also doesn't have the Sky's fancy swabs of "piano black" interior trim to spruce up what is otherwise a concerto in hard plastic.
The Sky has other differences. The exhaust is slightly quieter, the top insulated with another layer of acoustic material. A more Stay-Puft ride results from a longer suspension travel and shorter jounce bumpers. The refinement is turned up a notch over the Solstice, and it's noticeable. Over pavement holes the Sky's suspension lets the body down with softer landings. Lumps aren't as obtrusive. Dig into the throttle, and the burring from the DOHC 16-valve 2.4-liter four is more muted, its 6900-rpm redline less of a raspy thrash than in the Solstice. GM's Ecotec swings a big stroke and will never be confused with a zingy sports-car engine. In the Sky, the harshness is better hidden.
