I sold my last Metro a couple years ago, after driving/modding them for 8 years. I bought a Saturn LW300 from my car dealer friend. It was ready to tow behind my motorhome which was a major consideration. Fuel mileage was about half of my Metro at it's peak of 54 mpg at 27mpg. Let the festivities begin, after much research I found that they made a few 4 cylinder/5 speed cars L series cars. All the v-6 cars had automatics as well as most of the four cylinder cars. Saturn pulled this fairly large car from their Opel line, it is a Vectra B. Since GM bought Saab in the early 90s they also used this chassis on their 900, early 9-3 and their 9-5 until the sale. This is the first use of the 2.2 L Ecotec dohc all aluminum engine. General Motors spread use of this engine across several model lines starting in 2002. Like my father told me years ago " Don't buy a first year anything", holds true with the L61 four cylinder.
So the search was on for a loaded four cylinder stick shift Saturn L. I started with a 2002 and later found out this was the one year the all came stock with ABS, traction control, side curtain air bags and four wheel disc brakes. So I searched for many months and traveled 800 miles round trip when I found this car with a bad engine. It has what appears to be all the options, heated seats, fog lights, sunroof, leather etc...
I have installed a used engine with a new clutch, added a set of Saab wheels. The first eco-mod will be to change the final drive ratio from 4.45 to 4.05. That's 10% folks, should drop rpm to 2400 @ 60 mph. Now it is 2650 @ 60 mph. There is an elusive 3.86 ratio final out there somewhere that fits this Getrag F35 trans. I think it only came in the v-6 Saabs mid 2000s, pretty rare as most had the turbo four cylinders.
