Well I'm on vacation and getting ready to head back home. When I arrived here on Saturday Enterprise Rent A Car offered me a Saturn Vue Green Line. I thought to myself 'cool I'll get to check out another hybrid car'. Well I've been driving this SUV for a week and have nothing good to say about it. This car is horrible...I can't think of one good thing to say about this car. The mileage is lackluster. Our first tank we only managed to get 26MPG. Most of our driving (80%) was highway driving on flat land. Cruise control was used the entire time. During city driving I made an effort to make sure the green 'eco' light came on and stayed on. I have a 2006 CRV and I get almost 26 MPG. The A/C in this thing sucks especially when at a stop light. When the engine shuts off at a stoplight the A/C gets warm. There is a noticeable change in A/C temperature. It's very inconvenient...The car is a rattle box. Everything rattles in this thing. The road noise is deafening compared to my TCH. My 98 honda civic was a much better car than this thing. The interior is very cheap looking and feeling. The stereo sucks...

I guess I really don't have anything good to report about the Saturn Vue Hybrid. I am so thankful for the TCH and I can't wait to get back home to drive it.

Does anyone else have any experiences with the Saturn Vue Hybrid?

 

I agree with you (no need to drive any other vehicle), once you are hooked up with Toyota it is very difficult to change MAKE... what an awesome and quiet drive the TCH provides, now that I fixed the console noise it is even more sooo quiet...

 

The positive thing IMO is that they actually build a hybrid, which is a step in right direction and most of your complaints are not related to the hybrid system, but rather poor quality of the car in general, which is not that unusual for American made car. Also 26mpg for SUV is not that bad either. What I would like to know is how hybrid system operated, was it as seemless as TCH, was it CVT and if so did it have good pick up at all speeds and generally good performance? I also wonder why AC wasn't working properly, I would imagine they did switch to electrically powered compressor, didn't they? As a side note I never ever liked to drive SUV to begin with, they're all build more like a truck than sedan and maybe that could be part of your bad experience as well?