Monday Mileage Champion: Saturnalia

I told you that I would report back to the TTAC faithful when something new came up.

Well, for quite a few weeks there has been the usual distribution of dominance when it comes to high mileage cars that are curbed by their owners. 70% to 80% of the vehicles in the Top 25 of trade-ins mileage wise (out of 6000+ a week) were either Ford and Chevy trucks, Honda cars, or Toyota anything.

This week the streak is broken. Thanks to two Saturns which managed to cross the 400k mark.

Both of them are second generation SL models which carried the one car torch for Saturn throughout the 1990’s.

Imagine one cheap car having to hold up an entire mainstream car line and an extensive dealer network. What thought process on the 14th floor justified these types of hare brained decisions is beyond me. But thankfully these Saturns are the perfect beater bait for those folks who are willing to get religion off an asset that has cheap written all over it.

The androgynous rear end of this 2000 Saturn managed to occupy the road side scenery of North Carolina for 432,984 miles. It had zero announcements on the block. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that these cars are historically rather strong on the rattles and vibrations. Not to mention a plasticized interior that helped give rise to the $9995 Saturn deals of which, this Saturn likely qualified for back in the day. Although I would never argue with a new car purchase that yielded just over two cents a mile, it’s hard to understand why GM would let the powertrains on these models amortize for 13 model years.

The R&D rotting of Saturn was a shame because the non-rusting polymer panels on these models coupled with the MC Hammer era engines yielded a low ownership cost equation that was highly competitive for the time. If you looked at a car as a refrigerator like appliance and lived in the rust belt, these models were worthy of consideration. Speaking of which, this 1997 SL2 model from Illinois has managed to rack up 405,766 miles.

It does have a transmission needs service announcement and the gaps in a few places are nearly fist deep. Yep, the panels were resistant to rust. But give them a nice side kick or a 10 mph bump and you could be sure to have the polymer shatter design remain with the car until the very moment it became crusher fodder.

Trying to find an intact replacement fender at a pull-a-part on these vehicles is quite a task. It once took me four months to find one for a 96′ model coupe that I called the Purple People Eater. There is also more than a fair share of powertrain weirdness. The trannies on these models shift hard when they’re older. So hard in fact that any Saturn that isn’t a manual will almost always automatically get the ‘transmission needs service’ or ‘as/is’ announcement.

Such negativity has helped me get a few stellar deals over the years. There was a Saturn sedan, automatic, with only 37k that I managed to buy for only $1500 a few years back. It was only about 10 years old. Then there was another automatic model with 69k that went for only $1800. Both of them had transmission announcements and turned out to be perfectly fine. For a long time you could buy a decade old Saturn with less than 100k miles for only around $2000 wholesale.

When gas shot up over $3.00 a gallon for the first time these vehicles enjoyed a brief resurgence in popularity. Then the sub-prime mortgage crisis made these cheap cars even more coveted. Now that gas is closing in at $4.00, and it’s only February, I can no longer buy them on the cheap. Yesterday’s $2000 wholesale car is now a $3500 plus auction fee purchase that may not even be worth a flip.

These Saturns were never that bad. Nowadays though they’re not really that good for the price at the auctions. Yesterday’s $3000 retail car has become today’s $5500 piece of finance fodder. So if you want boring transportation and find one for a song, do it. Otherwise, if you do very little driving, buy a V8 domestic instead. Those cars are damn cheap these days at the auctions and jaw dropping affordable at the retail lots.