Best Saturn cars ranked

The surprise in Saturn nostalgia is that the brand’s most collectible car is not one of its plastic-paneled economy sedans. It’s the Saturn Sky, a two-seat roadster sold from the 2007 through 2010 model years, and Yahoo Autos put the turbocharged Sky Red Line at the top of its new ranking. (autos.yahoo.com, classic.com) That says a lot about what Saturn became. Saturn launched as a General Motors small-car experiment in 1985, built its first cars around dent-resistant polymer body panels, and hit a sales peak of 286,003 vehicles in 1994 before General Motors shut the brand down in 2010. (wikipedia.org, autotrends.org) The early cars that made Saturn famous were the S-Series coupes and sedans. Yahoo’s list includes the 1991 Saturn SC near the top because it was one of the few cars that was truly Saturn from the ground up, with a wedge shape, pop-up headlights, and a 123-horsepower four-cylinder engine. (autos.yahoo.com) Then Saturn spent the 2000s trying to act younger and faster with Red Line models. Yahoo’s list gives the 2005 Saturn Ion Red Line an A grade, and that car used a 205-horsepower supercharged 2.0-liter engine shared with the Chevrolet Cobalt Super Sport, turning a quirky compact coupe into Saturn’s first real performance car. (autos.yahoo.com) The Sky worked because it gave Saturn something it had almost never had before: a car people wanted for style first and practicality second. Classic.com says the Sky rode on the same platform as the Pontiac Solstice, and the Red Line version raised output from 177 horsepower in the base car to 260 horsepower with a turbocharged 2.0-liter engine. (classic.com) That mix is why the Sky still has a market while most Saturns are just used cars. Classics on Autotrader recently showed Saturn Sky Red Line asking prices ranging from about $12,000 to about $25,995, with an average listing around $19,818, which is far stronger than the values attached to old Saturn sedans most people remember from rental fleets and commuter duty. (classics.autotrader.com) Yahoo’s ranking also highlights the weird middle chapter when Saturn stopped being a clean-sheet brand and started borrowing heavily from elsewhere inside General Motors and from Europe. The list includes cars like the L-Series wagon, the Astra XR, and the Aura XR, all of which were more conventional than the original Saturn formula and, in different ways, less distinct. (autos.yahoo.com, wikipedia.org) That is why a “best Saturns” list ends up reading like a map of the brand’s identity crisis. The cars enthusiasts chase now are the ones that were either unmistakably Saturn at the start, like the SC, or unusually desirable at the end, like the Ion Red Line and the Sky Red Line. (autos.yahoo.com) If you are hunting one now, the split is simple. Buy an early S-Series if you want the original “different kind of car company” idea in its purest form, and buy a Sky Red Line if you want the Saturn that already crossed over from orphan brand curiosity into modern collectible. (autos.yahoo.com, classic.com, hagerty.com)