Has anyone else seen the new Saturn Ion commercial?

"My friend bought a car that gets great gas mileage, but it he gets passed on the road regularly by Mopeds". (A shot of a dork on a Moped is shown (not that all Moped drivers are dorks )).

I think GM is worried. It is getting pretty bad when they have to slam the small percentage of us who drive our wonderful autos!

 

There was a thread on it earlier. https://www.greenhybrid.com/discuss/...t-hybrids.html

 

Yeah, that commercial pressed my buttons real quick when I first saw it. I had to start a thread back then.

Wrote an e-mail to Saturn expressing my feelings about their cheesy advertisement. They responded back with a "Thank you for your interest in our fine vehicles" type of canned message. I was aggravated, but I got over it.

They are behind the technology curve and this is the best they can do with the product they have.

We can all speak out and spread the truth about our hybrids, and this commercial will be seen for what it is... weak humor from a big corporation that is in trouble... again.

Regards,

 

This is wrong on so many levels. It's true that the first generation of hybrids is a little hp challenged, but now with things coming out like the Lexus GS 450 which has 300hp and gets 30mpg, it is downright ignorant.

My last car was a Saturn and since I bought it the company has just gone to "hell in a handbasket"....

 

What's really funny, and ironic, and makes the commercial even more asinine is that he brags about 32 mpg and all the power, but the problem is this: If you are USING THAT POWER, you are NOT GETTING 32 MPG at the time you are using it. maybe about 5 mpg. If you compare the actual moment that the Saturn is achieving 32 MPG, the comparable Hybrid driving that same speed is up around 50 or 60 MPG. So that makes it MORE silly.....

 

The only thing that GM can do is demonize little cars, because they don't have anything to compete with them.

Saturn had been riding on its initial success for a while and is currently barely ticking over sales.

Alas, what's truly sad is the older Saturns got 36~40MPG and had plenty of power. The newer ones get WORSE gas mileage than the older ones. Saturn used to market their very nifty little cars as being the cheapest 'TCO' (total cost of ownership) of any cars, period. Then GM truly took over and turned Saturn into yet another Pontiac/Chevrolet/etc. They don't even bother to design the cars to be easy to work on anymore. Then they started selling ho-hum 6 cylinder cars that were hardly different from the other dozen brands of heavy, overpowered American cars and trucks, and their cars have just kept getting bigger and thirstier every year.

All that's left of the original Saturn prestige are the plastic body panels (the VUE's whole rear door is metal). What do they have planned? What do they focus all their marketing and research on?

Their bigger cars and the 'Sky' and 'Aura'. All style and marketing, nothing much else to offer.

Saturn IS working on a VUE hybrid, targetting a mere 10% increase in fuel economy on their biggest gas hog! I had a VUE (now I have a Honda HX). The VUE got about 22~25MPG no matter what I did. That's a more than 10% variance just from weather/driving. (The HX got 46.6MPG on its first tank.) The silly people at Saturn even put the generator/motor on the ACCESSORY BELT for their retarded 'hybrid'. Once upon a time, they had seemed to be gradually eliminating the accessory belt. Now they're planning to put a huge power demand... on a belt they were previously trying to eliminate. So, you can pay an additional $5000~7000 to get 27.5MPG and a big battery pack (to wear out), friction operated accessory belt that will have to be (very) routinely replaced, with an oversized alternator/motor/starter on it that wasn't designed for this purpose, and will probably overheat/burn out.

GM should be worried because they have a huge inventory of SUVs and "super size" cars, and precious little on the drawing boards or tooled up for production except gas hogs, and another major oil crunch is looming. How easy will it be to sell a gas guzzler that can't even get 30MPG when gasoline passes $3 this summer, and probably $4 within a year? How about one of those big SUVs that gets (maybe) 14MPG?

So, like the 70's and early 80's, we'll have a lot of undesirable cars made in the U.S. and a lot of imported car brands from lines that have been evoloving for fuel economy for some time, because they're exported to and sold in countries that don't subsidise petroleum prices like the U.S. does.

 

I actually checked out the Ion at a dealer - VERY BRIEFLY - just to be able to rule it out if for no other reason, and was most disappointed at how sparse the interior actually was. I wasn't expecting it to feel like a Mercedes but the 2005 HCH I opted for instead is just so much more nicely equipped AND pays itself back with real mileage.

 

well most mopeds get 100-150 mpg i'm shure Saturn cant top that

 

Not to mention serious misinformation