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STUDY: Ford owns brand loyalty in 2009; Scorned Saturn, Pontiac buyers will look outside of GM

Ford buyers appear to love their cars more than customers of any other automotive brand, returning back to the American automaker when it comes time to purchase their next vehicle. According to a study by Experian Automotive, six of the top 10 vehicles for customer brand loyalty wear badges from the Blue Oval. That includes the Ford Fusion (62.4 percent), Ford Edge (57.9 percent), Ford Five Hundred/Taurus (56 percent), Ford Freestyle (51.9 percent), Ford Escape (49.4 percent) and the Ford Focus (47.57 percent).
Other vehicles making up the top 10 include the Toyota Prius (52 percent), Chevy Impala (51.7 percent), Toyota Camry (47.8 percent) and Toyota Corolla (47.56 percent). This brings up an interesting question: With the closing of automotive brands like Saturn and Pontiac, where are those buyers to turn for their next automotive purchase?
Apparently, not back to General Motors. According to Experian, Pontiac owners are most likely to look to the Ford lineup for their next car or truck and Saturn shoppers will switch to Toyota or Honda - not particularly surprising given that Saturn was meant to compete with import brands. Experian predicts that GM's overall market share will fall from 20 percent to about 17.5 percent, with most of the slack being picked up by Ford, Honda and Toyota.

VIDEO: Saturn's demise? We blame Jim Gaffigan*

Click above to view the video after the jump
When the deal to sell Saturn to Penske Automotive fell through, there were likely a lot of surprised people at General Motors' Detroit, MI headquarters. Penske released a statement saying that the reason the deal fell through after months of good faith negotiations was that a suitable post-GM supply of vehicles could not be found. However, after reacquainting ourselves with over eight minutes of outtakes from Jim Gaffigan's old Saturn commercial, we're thinking the comedic pitchman is to blame.

Junkyard Gem: 2004 Saturn Vue with manual transmission

GM's Saturn Division has been gone since the final 2010 Auras, Outlooks, Skies, and Vues slunk apologetically out of the showrooms, and I'm doing my best to document the more interesting models from The General's once-revolutionary brand. Some of the later Saturns began life as Opel designs, but the Vue actually was the first vehicle to go on the all-new GM Theta platform; the Opel Antara was thus a Saturn copy, a fact that Saturn fans no doubt trot out when they get shamed by Opel zealots over the Astra. Today's Junkyard Gem is a most unusual Vue, in the sense that its original purchaser was fine with both the base manual transmission and the leather-upholstery upgrade. Sure, the cheapest way to buy a new Vue— which was sold here for the 2002-2007 model years— was to get it with the base transmission: a five-speed manual. You can still buy a new car with a five-on-the-floor manual right now, but only in a handful of cheapmobiles; by the middle 2000s, a tiny-and-ever-shrinking subset of American car shoppers would even consider a three-pedal commuter vehicle. Really, there were only two reasons an American new-car buyer would have considered a non-enthusiast vehicle with a manual transmission in 2004: either an eccentric preference for the good ol' stickshift or just plain penny-pinching. The cheapest possible '04 Vue was the version with four-cylinder 2.2-liter engine, front-wheel-drive, and five-speed manual transmission, and it started at $17,025 (about $26,080 in 2022 dollars). That's what we're looking at here. The optional CVT automatic transmission cost an additional $2,095 ($3,210 today), so it made sense to get the manual if you wanted to save serious money on your Vue. However, this car is loaded to the gunwales with nice equipment upgrades, to the tune of at least the Leather Appointments Package ($755) and the Sports Plus II Package ($1,300) and probably a lot more.  So, a buyer who didn't care about power (so no V6 engine), didn't want all-wheel-drive, liked driving a manual transmission Â… but insisted on power everything and a full-zoot comfy leather interior Â… in a cheap small SUV sold by a fast-fading brand. The conversations with the Saturn salesmen about this thing must have been interesting. Built in Tennessee, sold new in Denver, will be crushed near Pikes Peak.