Droning from beyond the firewall, a 140-horsepower, 2.2-liter four-cylinder engine does an acceptable job of keeping the Saturn Ion up to speed, but generates a groan more depressing than that of your spouse when the alarm clock sounds on Monday mornings. Drive over any kind of broken pavement, a common occurrence on our crumbling urban streets, and the mundane front strut and torsion beam rear axle suspension bits announce road anomalies both tactilely and aurally. Numb electric steering makes low-speed maneuvering easy, but feeds the driver no information about what is happening where the pavement meets the tires. Yester-tech rear drum brakes create dissatisfying brake pedal response that can be somewhat difficult to modulate depending on circumstances.

Despite multiple reasons to complain about the Saturn Ion, a week spent behind the wheel isn’t a sentence in Purgatory. Ownership might prove different, but our 2005 Saturn Ion 3 test car served as a decent commuter and errand runner for seven days, delivering 23.7 mpg in a mix of city and highway driving. Saturn has made numerous, and welcome, changes to the 2005 Ion, and the improvement over previous models is immediately apparent.