This Saturn Model Is Strangely Hard to Spot These Days

Every once in a while we look around a grocery store parking lot and notice a car from the not too distant past, but one that is clearly on the verge of extinction. A terribly bland car, sure, and one that would have been painfully common 20 years ago—and yet that seemingly vanished from the roads without so much as a pop.

The Saturn L-Series is definitely one of those cars, and we're betting that you hadn't really noticed its growing absence on our roads, unless you live somewhere around the Wilmington, Delaware, plant where it was produced from 1999 through 2005.

A couple of weeks ago we had a discussion about the prime suspects of this phenomenon— the unnoticed disappearance of once-common cars—and the L-Series emerged as one of the leading candidates, if not quite approaching Peugeot-level extinction.

For starters, it's difficult enough to get people to even remember what these were called—that's how anonymous the naming and the styling were. Secondly, in its brief production run Saturn managed to switch the badging around so frequently that it's hard to keep these things straight even now.

Third, the exterior design was very wholesome and beige, like a TV movie from the 1990s that would frequently run in the 2:00 PM slot on a Tuesday. The kind of styling that could be easily confused for half a dozen other brands, to the point that one's grandparents would have to constantly hit the panic button the key fob to find the car again in a Kmart parking lot.

Somehow, the L-Series even embraced the beige car persona, with a big percentage of these seemingly optioned in a golden champagne color, with the rest being Refrigerator White or Anonymous Silver.

The interiors were a sea of beige as well, coupled with that familiar smell of new GM plastics and cloth seats, with a few small chrome details thrown in to give it some glitz.

The L-Series also featured a GM quality that's largely faded from its repertoire—that of a smallish budget sedan trying to pull off the look of a slightly more upscale car. The L-Series achieved this with a much more conservative design than in the rest of the Saturn lineup (which manifested in sharp creases and aggressive spoilers on the Ion coupe, for instance). Despite the relatively short production run, the L-Series also went through not one but two naming changes for the sedans, and a fairly substantial facelift that added some adventurous headlights and honeycomb grilles for 2003.