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From Car and Driver magazine, see last line.
Saturn Vue V-6 AWD - Short Take Road Tests
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GM breaks down and buys a Honda.
BY AARON ROBINSON, PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL V. WINTER March 2004
The otherwise undistinguished career of your humble author took a lucky turn in 1999 when, while working at the trade newspaper Automotive News, a deep throat at GM let fly that the General was talking to the Honda Motor Company about buying V-6 engines. The rumble of Sloan and Kettering rolling over in their graves registered on the Richter scale.
The world's largest automaker, which spawned the automatic transmission, the self-starter, and the catalytic converter, was reduced by changes of fortune to buying engines from a smaller Japanese outfit that, 35 years ago, was marketing air-cooled two-cylinder cars with chain drive. This was big. But to be a news story, it needed a second source, another singing canary. What it got was the head goose.
Not long after, I was a guest of Honda's at the Twin Ring Motegi racetrack in Japan. Dawdling behind the pits awaiting a drive in an S2000, I turned around to find Honda's president, Hiroyuki Yoshino, standing nearby, alone, having wandered away from his ever-present SWAT team of handlers. The question was delivered with a shaky voice: Is Honda discussing an engine sale with GM? Yoshino, arms folded, eyes impassive, remained mute for a moment, then said, "Yes, and we are talking to Ford, too." Ding! Express ticket to page one, please.
Who knows what became of the Ford talks? The first byproduct of the GM deal is pictured right here between your thumbs: the 2004 Saturn Vue equipped with an SOHC 24-valve 3.5-liter V-6 built by Honda at its engine plant in Anna, Ohio.
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2001 Journey DL LD 330 Cat
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