2004 Saturn Ion Red Line Coupe 4-door 2.0l on 2040-cars

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GM investing $167m in Spring Hill for new midsize vehicles

General Motors has announced a large investment in its Spring Hill, Tennessee facility. The former home of Saturn production will be getting a $167 million addition to a previously announced $183 million, to cover a pair of new midsize vehicles. The investment is expected to create 1,800 jobs at the factory.
That $350 million is being divvied up for a pair of programs at Spring Hill. The first will take the bulk of the money ($223 million) and create 1,000 of the 1,800 jobs, while the other will take the remaining $127 million and generate the leftover 800 positions. But GM says the investment will cover "midsize vehicle programs." So what could they be?
The leading candidate in our minds is a new crossover for Buick, called the Anthem, that will slot between the Encore and Enclave, but will be slightly smaller than the Equinox and Terrain. As we've explained, the new model will likely be the first product to sport GM's new D2UX platform, which will eventually replace both the Delta and Theta platforms. Spring Hill is already building the Equinox, so there could be some credence to this theory.

NHTSA opens safety investigations into Toyota, GM and Honda crossovers

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is evidently keeping itself very busy these days, as the federal agency has just announced it is launching or renewing investigations into Toyota, Honda and General Motors crossovers.
2006-2008 model year Toyota RAV4 crossovers are under review for allegations of rear tie-rod rust which can result in failure. NHTSA also said it is probing some 35 complaints about 2005 Honda Pilot models with inappropriate activation of the vehicles' stability control system. The alleged malfunction can cause the vehicles to slow down or stop in bad unsafe situations. At the moment, NHTSA is reviewing a petition regarding the Pilot issue, a move that will determine whether it needs to open a full-blown investigation.
In addition, Saturn Outlook and GMC Acadia three-row crossovers built in 2007-2009 are getting looked at for "loss of low beam headlamp" function. One complainant said the wiring in his Outlook overheated and melted. NHTSA says it has received 415 complaints about the problem and a GM spokesman confirmed that the automaker already started a "Customer Satisfaction Program" in December to address the issue.

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.