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Junkyard Gem: 1996 Saturn SC1

Before the Saturn marque got locked into a downward spiral of muddled brand image and billion-dollar Opel badge engineering, American car shoppers loved Saturns' plastic bodies and fixed-price buying experience. The original SC coupe looked a bit like the Isuzu-built Geo Storm but was a Michigan design and had a smaller price tag, and it sold well. Here's a final-model-year first-generation SC1, languishing in a Denver-area wrecking yard with nearly 300k on the clock. Saturn S-Series cars were simple machines, and many examples held together for the long haul. This one reached the kind of mileage figure you'd expect to see on a Camry or Civic from the same era. I'm not quite sure what's going on here, but I suspect that the car's final owner performed a bit of spray-foam-and-Bondo bodywork when the rear plastic body panels got munched in a crash. The twin-cam Saturn engines made respectable power, but this car has the 100-horse single-cam under the hood. The car weighed a mere 2,282 pounds, though, so it had about the same power-to-weight ratio as the slightly heavier Honda Del Sol, with a much lower price tag ($12,195 for the SC1 versus $15,250 for the Del Sol). With a manual transmission, which this car has, the SC1 was a lot more fun to drive than most frugal commuter cars of its era. It's no Saturn Ion Redline (an example of which I found nearby in the very same wrecking yard), but still an interesting chapter from the tale of the rise and fall of Saturn. When you want a two-door with some spunk, sleep on it first. Yeah, we're puzzled by this ad, too. Featured Gallery Junked 1996 Saturn SC1 View 14 Photos Auto News Saturn Automotive History Coupe

Junkyard Gem: 2004 Saturn Vue with manual transmission

GM's Saturn Division has been gone since the final 2010 Auras, Outlooks, Skies, and Vues slunk apologetically out of the showrooms, and I'm doing my best to document the more interesting models from The General's once-revolutionary brand. Some of the later Saturns began life as Opel designs, but the Vue actually was the first vehicle to go on the all-new GM Theta platform; the Opel Antara was thus a Saturn copy, a fact that Saturn fans no doubt trot out when they get shamed by Opel zealots over the Astra. Today's Junkyard Gem is a most unusual Vue, in the sense that its original purchaser was fine with both the base manual transmission and the leather-upholstery upgrade. Sure, the cheapest way to buy a new Vue— which was sold here for the 2002-2007 model years— was to get it with the base transmission: a five-speed manual. You can still buy a new car with a five-on-the-floor manual right now, but only in a handful of cheapmobiles; by the middle 2000s, a tiny-and-ever-shrinking subset of American car shoppers would even consider a three-pedal commuter vehicle. Really, there were only two reasons an American new-car buyer would have considered a non-enthusiast vehicle with a manual transmission in 2004: either an eccentric preference for the good ol' stickshift or just plain penny-pinching. The cheapest possible '04 Vue was the version with four-cylinder 2.2-liter engine, front-wheel-drive, and five-speed manual transmission, and it started at $17,025 (about $26,080 in 2022 dollars). That's what we're looking at here. The optional CVT automatic transmission cost an additional $2,095 ($3,210 today), so it made sense to get the manual if you wanted to save serious money on your Vue. However, this car is loaded to the gunwales with nice equipment upgrades, to the tune of at least the Leather Appointments Package ($755) and the Sports Plus II Package ($1,300) and probably a lot more.  So, a buyer who didn't care about power (so no V6 engine), didn't want all-wheel-drive, liked driving a manual transmission Â… but insisted on power everything and a full-zoot comfy leather interior Â… in a cheap small SUV sold by a fast-fading brand. The conversations with the Saturn salesmen about this thing must have been interesting. Built in Tennessee, sold new in Denver, will be crushed near Pikes Peak.

A chopped-up General Motors EV1 shell sold for $23,662

Despite not having a VIN, a powertrain, a frame, or any doors, a decrepit General Motors EV1 shell recently sold for $23,662.10 on govdeals.com. Sold by the University of Cincinnati, the car — or what remains of it — is headed to an electric vehicle collection called The Beata Electric Motor Carriage Collection. Technically, the GM EV1 was the first mass-produced and purposed-built electric car in America. When it was released in 1996 for the 1997 model year, however, GM strictly leased the car as part of a "real-world engineering evaluation." The limited production run was meant to test real life with an EV and judge the interest from the public. GM only built 1,117 units, all of which were recalled, and most of them ultimately were sent to the crusher. But a select few were stripped of their powertrains and donated to universities and museums for educational purposes. One of those non-functioning cars made it to the University of Cincinnati in 2008. The post says it "has been in storage since," but it's not clear if the car sat in storage untouched or was stored and used by the university. According to EpiclyEpicEthan1, who posted the sales listing to r/cars, the car was purchased by The Beata Electric Motor Carriage Collection in Colorado. The Beata (derived from the Latin word for blessed) collection is a gathering of '90s OEM electric vehicles and a general EV hub. The website says the vehicles are used for testing, diagnostics, education, events, and overall preservation and documentation. The rare and niche collection also includes a 1993 Dodge/Chrysler TEVan, a 1997 Honda EV Plus, a 1999 Dodge/Chrysler EPIC EV, a 1998 Ford Ranger EV, a 2002 Toyota RAV4 EV LongRanger III, a Tesla Roadster, a 1998 Nissan Altra EV, a 1998 Chevrolet S-10 EV, a 2011 Nissan Leaf, and a 2012 Tesla Model S. Beata also has several other projects under construction such as the 2000 Toyota RXT-G Prototype, a 1997 RAV4 coupe EV prototype, the 1995 AC Propulsion eCivic EV, a 1995 ACP RXT-G Prototype LongRanger II, a 1995 ACP RXT-G Prototype LongRanger I, and a GM EV1. Beata acts as a resource for EV1 owners and helps place parts it finds and doesn't need. The parts it does need are put into building a working EV1. Beata's current EV1, which is 80 percent complete, is made up from more than 50 different parts sources, including from all three versions of the EV1, the 1994 LPF4 PreView "Impact" series, the 1997 EV1, and the 1999 EV1.