![]() ![]() 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. 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. 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. Why couldn't it have been neatly embossed on the bumper? The lonely "Sky" badge adrift on the rump looks like an afterthought. The headlights and the taillights are busied with proliferating lenses - the Sky has projector-beam headlamps, the Solstice doesn't - and chrome spears. 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 Sky takes up where the Solstice's clean, orbicular shape leaves off. 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, assembled alongside the Solstice in Wilmington, Delaware, is 3.9 inches longer than the Pontiac but otherwise virtually identical dimensionally. First it sired the Pontiac Solstice roadster (December 2005), and now it gives life to a Saturn cub-Vette. The Kappa is now experiencing cell mitosis. 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. Saturn never saw the sun shining so bright, never saw things goin' so right.Īt least, that's the giddy feeling people get when first gazing at the Saturn Sky. Saturn, the official transportation of coupon-clipping pensioners and unemployed psych majors, will become a distribution network for urbane Opels from the Continent. The dealers moved 213,657 Saturns in 2005 against competitors with better reputations and better cars with better resale values.Īnd now GM is taking a renewed interest in its giant ball of gas. Power and Associates dealer-satisfaction surveys, where Saturn consistently rates with Toyota, Honda, and even Lexus - didn't give up. 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. Here comes the 2007 Saturn Sky, and with it, Saturn's long-foretold revival goes back onto the front burner. 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. 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. A decade slipped away before Saturn produced a second product line, the lackluster L-series. 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. ![]()
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