Car reliability is incredible now vs older cars. It’s kind of amazing what they’ve done. But the plastic exteriors suck. Saturn’s concept of dyed plastic instead of painted makes more sense, but I don’t think they do that anymore.
Yeah I remember in the '80s how few 1960s cars were left around. Now we’re in 2026 and we have parking lots full of early 2000s cars with no reliability issues.
Saturns were painted, even on the plastic components, not dyed. I owned one, an SL2. The plastic panels were black underneath the paint, which is the same formula GM was already using on plastic bumpers, etc.
On the true Saturns, i.e. the S and L series cars before they got reabsorbed back into GM and became more rebadged Chevys, the vertical surfaces were plastic but the horizontal ones were steel. So the hood, roof, and trunk lid were traditional sheet metal fabrications but the bumpers, doors, front fenders, and rear wings were plastic. These were overlaid on a “space frame” underneath made of pressed sheet steel parts, so despite all the plasticwork these things weren’t much lighter than a traditionally built car of roughly the same displacement. They were dent resistant in the same way a plastic bumper is, but if you hit them hard in cold temperatures you could get the panels to crack or even shatter.
There was also one poor bastard on the forums back in the day who posted a picture of his SL that he parked too close to a wildfire and all of the plastic panels melted and glued his card to the pavement. To be fair, the interior of that car was also a congealed puddle by that point so it would have been a writeoff even if it were a metal car.
On the bright side, my SL2 got a consistent 40 MPG and it wasn’t full of nannyware shit like the cars of today. The S series cars were also significantly easier to work on than many of their contemporaries, and basically anything made today. I sold mine to some kid who wrecked it like a week later, and the only reason I sold it was because I had too many cars at the time. In retrospect I should have kept the fucker and sold something else to make room in the driveway.
Car reliability is incredible now vs older cars. It’s kind of amazing what they’ve done. But the plastic exteriors suck. Saturn’s concept of dyed plastic instead of painted makes more sense, but I don’t think they do that anymore.
Yeah I remember in the '80s how few 1960s cars were left around. Now we’re in 2026 and we have parking lots full of early 2000s cars with no reliability issues.
Saturns were painted, even on the plastic components, not dyed. I owned one, an SL2. The plastic panels were black underneath the paint, which is the same formula GM was already using on plastic bumpers, etc.
On the true Saturns, i.e. the S and L series cars before they got reabsorbed back into GM and became more rebadged Chevys, the vertical surfaces were plastic but the horizontal ones were steel. So the hood, roof, and trunk lid were traditional sheet metal fabrications but the bumpers, doors, front fenders, and rear wings were plastic. These were overlaid on a “space frame” underneath made of pressed sheet steel parts, so despite all the plasticwork these things weren’t much lighter than a traditionally built car of roughly the same displacement. They were dent resistant in the same way a plastic bumper is, but if you hit them hard in cold temperatures you could get the panels to crack or even shatter.
There was also one poor bastard on the forums back in the day who posted a picture of his SL that he parked too close to a wildfire and all of the plastic panels melted and glued his card to the pavement. To be fair, the interior of that car was also a congealed puddle by that point so it would have been a writeoff even if it were a metal car.
On the bright side, my SL2 got a consistent 40 MPG and it wasn’t full of nannyware shit like the cars of today. The S series cars were also significantly easier to work on than many of their contemporaries, and basically anything made today. I sold mine to some kid who wrecked it like a week later, and the only reason I sold it was because I had too many cars at the time. In retrospect I should have kept the fucker and sold something else to make room in the driveway.