Saturn VUE Washington DC

BY AARON ROBINSON

Hope dies hard, but it does die. It fizzled out for some when they pulled the sheet off the Pontiac Aztek. For others it croaked when GM announced that it would pull the sheet over the Camaro and Firebird. For the rest, still believing that the world's largest carmaker can produce a best-in-class vehicle for Americans that isn't a truck or a two-seat V-8 sports car is an act of faith.

By the time the unsold Valentine's Day candy hits the discount shelves next year, GM will test our convictions again with a pair of new buggies that are on a mission to help reenergize the company's prosaic car offerings. One model, the Saturn VUE, may just save an entire division while putting a slightly new gloss on the familiar car-based sport-utility formula. The other, the Pontiac Vibe, was jointly developed with Toyota and is a smartly packaged urban hauler that gets GM early into a segment that is new to this country, the "high cube" mini-wagon now owned almost entirely by DaimlerChrysler's PT Cruiser.

Arriving soft on the heels of the 2001 Ford Escape, which itself arrived rather soft on the heels of the 1996 Toyota RAV4 and 1997 Honda CR-V, the 2003 Saturn VUE is a Ford Escape-sized sport-ute also built on passenger-car mechanicals. The VUE's underside blends existing GM engines, the 2.2-liter in-line four and L81 3.0-liter V-6 of Saturn's L-series, with some drivetrains unique to GM, including an Aisin-Warner five-speed automatic and a home-grown continuously variable transmission (CVT). Also new is the unitized steel structure sheathed in Saturn's requisite thermoplastic panels. Production begins this fall in Spring Hill, Tennessee, with a base price of, in Saturn's words, "less than $20,000."

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