The End

It must have been 13 or 14 years ago that we discovered Saturn. We were looking for a new car and we stumbled, quite by accident, into Saturn of Orem.

We weren't really expecting to buy a Saturn, especially since my wife didn't know how to drive a car with a manual transmission, and the only Saturn we could really afford had a stick shift.

The sales lady spent an evening in the parking lot near the Saturn "retail facility" teaching my wife how to drive a manual transmission car.

The next day, we owned our first Saturn. A couple of days later, my wife got to try out her new driving skills as she drove me to the emergency room early in the morning with my first kidney stone.

We liked the Saturn philosophy. We liked that it was a "retail facility" and not a "dealership." We liked the no haggle process. The more we learned, the more we liked,

A few years later, we traded that Saturn in on another, newer one. I ended up in a pretty bad wreck in that one. The truck that hit me mashed the front wheel and driver's side door. I had a bump on my noggin and had nightmares for a while, but was otherwise unhurt.

We again traded up to a newer Saturn back in 1999. This one was a barely-owned fully loaded Saturn. That was the car that we drove all over in with kids' car seats in the back.

When we needed an inexpensive commuter car, we bought yet another Saturn--this one the oldest one we had ever owned. I drove that one to work for a few years. We gave that one away to my sister-in-law and they're still driving it.

Tonight, the "barely-owned fully loaded" Saturn drove away. After a few repairs, another fender bender, and even a teenaged driver, our days of owning Saturns are over. They just don't make it up our driveway in the winter. Not to mention that Saturn, as a company, is no more.