Saturn models

Saturn was General Motors' big experiment, founded in 1985 as 'a different kind of car company.' The idea was to build small cars that could compete with the Japanese, inside a brand-new company with its own plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, its own union deal, and its own no-haggle, customer-friendly way of selling.

For a while it worked, and Saturn earned unusually loyal owners who liked the dent-resistant plastic body panels, the straightforward pricing, and the sense that someone was finally trying something new in Detroit. The early cars were modest but the experience around them stood out.

The experiment eventually unravelled. GM stopped investing in distinct Saturn models, started rebadging other cars as Saturns, and the brand lost what made it different. It was shut down in 2010 in the wake of GM's bankruptcy. For buyers today Saturn exists only on the used market, an interesting footnote about a carmaker that briefly tried to reinvent how cars were sold rather than just how they were built.