Glad to be on the Saturn Forum. The two Saturn's that I have are a 2008 XR 3 door with just over 20,000 miles and an XE 5 door, rebadged as an Opel, with about 138,000 miles, both 5 speeds. While on the "other" site for almost 14 years I learned a lot about the car, and hope to learn more and help others with theirs. This summer I plan on performing a timing belt and oil cooler seals replacement on the XE. The XR obviously needs nothing. It appears the Astra section is a bit under used on this forum. Hope to see more of the other Astra owners post.

 

Welcome.

1st member here to have 2 Astras...

There are fewer refugees than I expected. I guess it's more of a slow trickle.

Please stick around. More members w Astras in the last two months than the previous 15 years combined.

 

Welcome! I second, please hang around. Astra’s are very cool. I have the L variant which is an Opel Vectra B.

 

Welcome to the forum. I know absolutely NOTHING about the Astras other than I rarely see one anywhere I go. Any information you know and can share will be a bonus for us all.

 

Hi, I'm new to this forum as of today, and, I'm glad I found this site. I don't know if I'm posting in the right location, so please forgive this if I'm not. I was a member of Saturn Fan site but I guess that's gone now. I have a 2002 Saturn SL2 4dr which is approaching 138k miles. It runs great, it was my mother's car and I really like it. We bought it from the original owner in 2004. I lost all my maintenance records for the car in the Paradise, CA 2018 Camp Fire...the whole town was virtually destroyed and I lost everything. Now that I'm somewhat back on my feet, the only car that survived the fire is the Saturn. So, I'm thinking about changing the transmission fluid, I can't remember when or if it's been done before. What I do remember is we did a major tune up for the car in 2007 before a very long road trip. Right now there are no issues with the transmission but I'm aware that changing the fluid might cause problems. The current fluid does not look too dark. If anyone has any advice or cautionary concerns regarding this I'd very much appreciate hearing about it. I'm just not sure what I should do about this since the fire forced me to delay many things. It's been 5 years now and I'm still playing catch up and recovery from all that. I'll keep this car as long as it's reliable, I don't need to drive daily anymore so it's used sparingly. I've kept up with other maintenance concerns for the car. Thanks for any help, I'll start looking around the site. -Bill

 

Drain n fill, no flush

 

Hi derf, Thanks for your response. I'm leaning in that direction after reading about the damage a flush can do. Do you or anyone else know what the recommend replace cycle was by Saturn for this 2002 SL2? If we did have the fluid changed in 2007, that would be about 60k to 70k miles ago so the car might be still in or just out of the replace cycle. I haven't been able to find the mileage change recommendation. Thanks for any further help.

 

17 years?
Give it some TLC.

 

Just a general question. Is this your recommendation for all Saturn and if so does draining also empty the torque converter or is it a two step process? Thanks for all you do here on the forum.

 

No, draining won't drain the torque converter. Unfortunately, there's no way to drain it. Just drain and fill a couple of times if you're that concerned about what's in the converter. As long as you're not having problems now, just a drain and refill should suffice.