Twelve years often can seem to fly by, but for the folks from Saturn – the car company, not the planet – the past 12 years must have moved like molasses as they waited for the opportunity to replace the aging S Series with an up-to-date vehicle. The Ion replaces that car with a vehicle built off GM’s new Delta small-car architecture. The sedan variant has 93 ft³ of interior space, sits on a 103.2-in. wheelbase, spans 185-in. overall, and has a first-order beaming of 27 Hz. Pretty good numbers, all. Dual-stage front airbags and seat belt pre-tensioners are standard, with side curtain airbags available as an option. The vehicle microprocessors are linked via a network, which allows a number of personalization programs to be integrated into the system. So headlights can come on with the wipers, door locking and unlocking can be programmed a number of ways, and so on. It’s almost as if the tech folks from Saturn – the planet, not the car company – were involved.

Certainly that’s true of the styling. The Ion has a conservative, but otherworldly look to it. The roof line is a sweeping arch reminiscent of a VW or Audi, but the rest of the car is unique. There are the horizontal headlights, side “swoosh”, and the corporate badge behind the front wheels – all very Saturn, yet all very nondescript. And the roof rail covers can be changed as part of a personalization scheme that offers accents in leopard, blue bubble (think lava lamp), silver braid (a carbon fiber knockoff) or brushed steel patterns. It’s as though the folks on Saturn had their telescopes trained on Las Vegas when they set pencil to paper.

The same is true of the interior, where the gauge cluster is located directly above the instrument panel center stack, and is angled toward the driver. This leaves a bare expanse in front of the driver, but gave the engineers the opportunity to make the steering wheel smaller without compromising the driver’s ability to read the gauges. Of course, this also means that the wheel feels unnaturally small at first – it takes a while to get used to, but eventually becomes second nature – and the airbag cover looks like a giant Sta-Puft marshmallow. Thankfully, the gauges are easy to read, the stalks and switches feel crisp and precise, and items like the climate control work very well, indeed. Just be careful, the personalization program also extends to the instrument pod, shift quadrant, HVAC and radio panels. You can even change the face of the key fob.

All this weirdness fades when you get out on the road for the simple reason that this is one tight chassis mated to a well-sorted suspension, and powered by a reasonably torquey 2.2-liter inline four. In fact, the Ion has all of the makings of a budget sport sedan, but is lacking in one important area: personality. Which is quite an oversight for a vehicle that can be personalized so extensively. Maybe the marketing department didn’t want to offend anyone with a vehicle that had a raspy exhaust note or aggressive suspension settings, despite giving the car pedals spaced for heel-and-toe downshifts. Yet the fact that this is even an issue shows how far Saturn has come since the S Series debuted 12 years ago. That car was the ultimate nondescript grocery getter, a vehicle that could serve as a getaway vehicle based on its ability to blend into the surroundings Zelig-like, leaving no trace of its existence.

There is hope, however. A “tuner” version of the Ion Coupe will debut at the 2002 SEMA Show in Las Vegas, to be followed by a production version in the 2004 model year. An Eaton supercharger boosts the 2.2-liter four’s output above 200 hp, while an aftermarket exhaust gives the car the voice it’s currently missing. It wouldn’t take much to transfer these bits to the Ion sedan, or so insiders say, and the resulting increase in both performance and personality would be worth the wait. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take an intergalactic conference to make it happen.