The Chevrolet Cobalt SS Had A Weird Cousin With Strange Doors

In the pantheon of GM Performance, the Saturn brand doesn’t get much attention. Created in the early ’90s as a way to compete against the onslaught of Japanese economy cars, the brand was conceived as a no-nonsense company with straightforward trims, advanced construction, and no-haggle pricing. They were sensible, affordable vehicles, and while the brand never became the sales hit GM hoped it would be, buyers who found themselves in a Saturn became very fond of the products.

However, the brand wasn’t just about basic vehicles. Over its life, GM attempted to build a little more excitement for Saturn by introducing Red Line models – performance variants that added power, handling upgrades, and more aggressive styling to their target vehicle. One of the first models to receive the new trim was the Ion compact car, a short-lived experiment that blended real performance with an unorthodox design, turning it into one of the oddest and underappreciated GM vehicles of all time.

The Time GM Gave Saturn A Performance Coupe

In the early 2000s, Saturn was known as the plastic car company for people who didn’t like buying cars. The designs were inoffensive, affordable, and unique, and their outer skins wer made of rust-free and dent-proof plastic. But the company was only a few years away from being nothing more than a cheap rebadge of Chevys, and lost their Saturn uniqueness.

A major shift occurred at the company in 2001 thanks to the arrival of Bob Lutz, which would alter the course of nearly every brand in GM’s stable with a healthy dose of performance. As Vice Chairman of Product Development, he oversaw the creation of performance models like the Cadillac CTS-V, the Pontiac GTO, and the Chevy Camaro revival, to name a few. He even saw fit to give Saturn its own performance line, and soon Red Line was born.

For the Ion, this meant a host of changes that started with kicking the 140-horsepower 2.2-liter inline-four in the base Ion to the curb. This was replaced with a supercharged 2.0-liter Ecotec engine, which produced a much more impressive 205 horsepower and 200 lb-ft of torque. Mated to a five-speed manual transmission and sending that power strictly to the front wheels – a limited-slip differential would come in 2005 – GM claimed the vehicle could hit 60 mph from a standstill in just six seconds.

However, it wasn’t just about straight-line speed, as Saturn added many other features that helped the Red Line turn the boring Ion into something special:

• Lowered sports suspension tuned by GM’s Performance Division
• Available Recaro front seats and a boost gauge package
• 17-inch wheels and beefier brakes
• Optional limited-slip differential, fog lights, shift lights, and unique wheels from 2005 onward

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Excitingly, GM even offered two dealer engine upgrade kits that could unlock as much as 241 horsepower and 218 lb-ft of torque. Along with the more dramatic looks, it was a package that impressed reviews from the time, but no amount of side molding or supercharger whine was going to be able to hide the oddness of the coupes’ overall design.

The Quad Coupe Doors Were… Something Else

When Saturn unveiled the Ion in 2003, it released it in two variants: sedan and “Quad Coupe”. The latter was the only body style the Ion Red Line was ever unveiled, and it consisted of a coupe with two rear suicide-style barn doors that could only be opened after the front ones had been opened. If you’ve ever spent time around a first-gen Hyundai Veloster or Mazda RX-8, you get the general idea, and it was meant to make the vehicle much more usable for buyers.

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Getting in and out of the rear seats was now a breeze, and they made loading large items onto the folded-down seats even easier. It was essentially a four-door vehicle masquerading as a coupe, and while it certainly made the variant much more useful, the way the panel gaps cut up the sides of the car took away any cohesiveness the car might have had, especially because Saturn’s panel gaps were particularly wide at the time due to the plastic body panels requiring larger tolerances for fitment and to allow for expansion and contraction due to temperature changes.

Despite sharing a platform with other GM products, the Ion was the only one to ever feature the odd design, a trend that has proven to be something of a pastime for the iconic automaker. However, if you can get past the looks, by most accounts, the Ion Red Line was a supremely competent sports coupe, one that accelerated, turned, and stopped with the best of them at the time. However, it had one big problem, and that problem wore a Chevy badge.

A Legitimate Sleeper Overshadowed By Its Cousin

The very same year the Saturn Ion Red Line was revealed, so was the Chevy Cobalt SS, and that created quite a predicament. See, one of Saturn’s biggest problems from the very start was the cannibalization of sales within the GM stable. Saturn was created to compete against models from Honda and Toyota, but those were companies, not sub-brands, and GM quickly found out many of its buyers were still more interested in its traditional Chevrolet offerings, rather than some new, economical brand.

The Cobalt SS automatically started with a leg up on its Saturn rival because of this, and this was helped by its own favorable reviews, the choice of a sedan variant, and overall looks that simply came off better than the somewhat awkward Saturn. On top of this, things got even worse as time wore on. While both models arrived with the same engine, drivetrain layout, and transmission options, the Red Line kicked the bucket in 2007, while the Cobalt SS received a serious upgrade in performance.

The supercharged engine was dropped after 2007, and a turbocharged version of the same engine was added, which boosted power to a significant 260 horsepower and 260 lb-ft of torque. This was the same engine found in the performance versions of the Pontiac Solstice and Saturn Sky twins, and it allowed the Cobalt, along with other performance upgrades, to lap the famed Nürburgring as fast as everyone’s favorite M3.

Once these headlines hit the world, the Ion Red Line quickly became a distant memory, one whose legacy we feel deserves another look in 2025.

Forgotten Now, But A Unique Part Of GM History

Today, the Saturn Ion is a forgotten artifact of a bygone era in GM history. The company isn’t interested in creating and owning all of these different sub-brands anymore, which is why it’s kept to the same core brands it found itself in charge of after the Great Recession hit. Saturn, once a bastion of GM ingenuity and the company’s willingness to learn from its Japanese counterparts, is barely remembered outside car circles.

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However, take a look at any of the original Saturn products, you know, the ones that were more than a poorly rebadged Opel or Chevy, and you’ll find vehicle owners still rave about them to this day with hundreds of thousands of miles on the odometer. The Ion Red Line sits on top of this heap with the other Red Line models as a perfect combination of the trademark Saturn quirkiness, with performance that genuinely impresses.

Those doors are even starting to grow on us. Just imagine how easy it makes transporting things like groceries, a child, a pet, or even a TV? Then, once they’re safely secured, you can barrel down a back road and enjoy excellent handling with supercharged performance. It’s a model that deserves more respect, and could be the perfect purchase for anyone who wants a compact performance sedan outside the norm.

Sources: GM.