Apparently, Saturn Owners Are A Suicidal Lot

There is this ad in the classifieds back cover of City Pages, the local alternative weekly, that always puzzles and cracks my shit up. It is from a local GMC dealer trying to court owners of Saturn cars. Saturn was the GM label from the nineties that was supposed to represent a "a new kind of car company." For a long time I wanted to get a Saturn as soon as I was able to afford to buy a new car.

I'm still unsure why, but in the auto bailouts of a few years ago, General Motors decided to shut down Saturn and a few of their other models to cut costs. Guess running a company with no-haggle pricing and no union didn't work out so well.

So where do Saturn owners turn to to fix their cars, at least the ones who don't know better than to run to their dealerships every time they need an oil change when it could be done at an independent shop closer to home for about half the price? Well, this dealership wants to save you from your misery, Saturn owners.

The thing that gets me about the small ad is the photo that accompanies the large tagline, "Saturn owners feeling abandoned?" There are several of them, each showing a person in various states of distress completely disproportionate to the not-quite serious problem of finding a new place to get your car fixed. There's a guy resting his face on his hands in obvious stress. There's a melancholic woman staring blankly in a forest. These are photos that should be run with Abilify commercials, not ones for car dealerships.

Does this dealership know how bizarrely hilarious his ads are? They're acting like they're the ones saving Saturn owners from getting in their cars and driving them over the cliff because if they can't find someone that'll help fix their Saturn, might as well wreck them and kill themselves in the process. Maybe you don't want to run a picture that makes those owners look like they just lost a child, OK?