When building a minivan, some of the traditional car-building priorities go out the window because even the magazines don’t really care too much about how a minivan drives. You could build a minivan that gets around the Nurburgring in eight minutes flat, has astounding brake pedal feel, and communicates volumes through the steering, and nobody will care about it if the seats aren’t comfortable and storage cubbies aren’t abundant. These are living rooms on wheels, 80-mph mess traps that will likely see harder lives than most crew cab pickup trucks because kids aren’t easy on things. If a grown adult eats too many Cheerios and pukes in a moving vehicle, that’s embarrassing. If a young child does it, that’s Tuesday. As such, GM didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. While Toyota and Honda went supersized with the 2004 Sienna and 2005 Odyssey respectively, GM took the familiar bones of its existing minivans and gave them some calcium to produce what it called Crossover Sport Vans.
That sounds like an odd metaphor, but it makes sense. Take a look at this IIHS crash test footage of the 1997 Pontiac Trans Sport and tell me that isn’t terrifying. The entire A-pillar deforms to an acute angle, while the footwell buckles to potentially trap the driver as the firewall moves toward the seat. Given the prevalence of these vans and their rebadged brethren, it’s a wonder anyone survived at all. Unsurprisingly, GM made some serious alterations to the structure underpinning the Crossover Sport Vans, and the result speaks for itself.
In addition to safety, GM updated the styling of its garden-variety people carriers. Here are vans with longer, more horizontal hoods that shoppers were used to, and they did a good job of latching onto some crossover styling cred. Mind you, it certainly helped that GM had many versions to go around. Oh yes, it’s rebadge round-up time.
Let’s start with the obvious, the Chevrolet Uplander. No relation to the Mitsubishi Outlander, of course. This large-nosed minivan replaced the tired Chevrolet Venture and was a marked improvement over its predecessor. Despite having a very similar roofline to the old van, the new nose really punches things up.
While Chevrolet ditched its old van’s name, Pontiac tacked on some extra characters to create the Montana SV6. Inarguably the most plastic-clad of the Crossover Sport Vans, it was short-lived in America but production ran well into 2008 for Canada and Mexico.
For those who thought every Pontiac and Chevrolet dealer was basically Big Bill Hell’s Cars, there was the Saturn Relay with no-haggle pricing and the famous Saturn dealership experience of salespeople dressed like they want to be barbecuing. Unsurprisingly, this was also largely a plastic rebadge with different bumpers, cladding, wheels, and little else separating it from its long-wheelbase Pontiac and Chevrolet equivalents. This was actually the shortest-lived CSV variant, in production for just two years, four months, and 28 days.
By the time 2004 rolled around, Oldsmobile was dead, so who would sell the Cadillac of minivans? That’s right, it’s Buick with the Terraza. More wood, more leather, and more chrome could all be found on yet another mostly plastic re-badge of GM’s corporate minivan. Oh, and weirdly, this one got independent rear suspension regardless of drivetrain.
Based on reworked old bones and re-badged to death, you’d be forgiven for thinking the Crossover Sport Vans weren’t very good. However, if you needed a minivan and didn’t have a local Nissan, Toyota, or Honda dealership, you’d have picked one of these GM vans every time. Here’s why.
Let’s start with the interior, often a sore spot for pre-bankruptcy GM products. While not as upscale as the cabins in the Honda Odyssey and Toyota Sienna, the crossover sport vans were alright on the inside. Sure, not every plastic surface is soft-touch, but the materials were class-competitive overall. We’re talking tightly-grained hardwearing plastic that was perfect for minivan use. Dashboard design wasn’t bad either with intuitive controls and reasonably tight shut lines.
Unlike just about every other minivan at the time, the Crossover Sport Vans’ seats didn’t fold into a well behind the rear axle. Instead, GM installed a slightly elevated storage bin in the cargo area, and the third-row folded flush with that. While the liftover lip was mildly annoying, it was nicer than craning way down to retrieve cargo from a well.
However, while GM compromised on folding seats, it went all-out on interior storage. The backs of the bucket seats featured available hard-faced plastic storage compartments as kick-resistance places to store small items, while a novel track system in the headliner accommodated several overhead storage modules for everything from CDs to sunshades. You could even get a 110-volt outlet for powering air compressors and the like.
Now let’s talk powertrains and dig into why these vans are such tanks. In 2004, GM pulled a new cam-in-block 60-degree V6 out of its hat which eventually got used in the Crossover Sport Vans in both 3.5-liter and 3.9-liter forms. Granted, it didn’t get off to a brilliant start with technical service bulletins out for head gasket failure, but issues with early models were generally sorted under warranty and models produced after 2007 are pretty much in the clear. Paired with the tried-and-true 4T65-E, and you have a durable powertrain capable of outlasting much of the domestic competition. You could even get these vans with all-wheel-drive if you lived in snowy locales.
So, what we have here is a very practical vehicle, but it wasn’t well-received. On the face of things, it was a half-hearted attempt at keeping up with the Joneses with an under-powered, under-geared re-work of a 1990s minivan for the iPod age. Unsurprisingly, it was a flop in America, and was often derided as one of GM’s worst products of the time. The New York Daily News included the Uplander on its list of the ten worst Chevrolets of all time, while Car And Driver claimed that “On paper, the [Buick] Terraza is overpriced in comparison with competitors that offer higher power, greater sophistication, and more flexible interior configurations.” Add it all up and we have to call this one as a miss then, right? Not so fast, because I’m not from the United States. North of the border, things were a little bit different.
See, our money hasn’t historically been worth a whole lot, and real estate in that tiny strip of Ontario a good chunk of Canada resides in is awfully expensive. As such, we love a good bargain, and the GM vans were the bargains of the bunch. Because you could still get a standard-wheelbase Uplander or Montana SV6 after everyone else decided to only make long-wheelbase minivans, you could saunter on down to your local Chevrolet dealer in 2009 and see Uplanders stickering for $24,390 in loonies. That was more than $4,500 cheaper than the basest of base Toyota Siennas, and everyone knew damn well that nobody paid full sticker price for a mass-market GM product.
Back in the days of the recession, I remember brand new short-wheelbase base-model Uplanders marked down to around $20,000 in Canada. That’s like two real dollars for an entire minivan. Long-wheelbase models were trading for around $25,000, which was still way cheaper than a Sienna. Regardless of wheelbase, you got a stronger motor than the wheezy 3.3-liter V6 in the Grand Caravan, and you could often score the Uplander or its Pontiac Montana SV6 for a cheaper price. Not only that, the Crossover Sport Vans were actually better in some ways than their pure crossover successors. Sure, the Buick Enclave may have wowed when it launched, but how many do you see sitting in junkyards as the result of timing chain failure?
Yes, the GM Crossover Sport Vans prove that anything can have a redemption arc so long as favorable conditions align. If the price is right and the market is accepting, certain flaws can be overlooked, especially if the low-end competition has more impactful flaws. While these vans never took off in America, they found enough of a Canadian following to get an extended production run, which makes them just barely a hit. Plus, they’re a lesson to other automakers: Repackaging old bones isn’t always a bad thing so long as the resulting product can somehow be sold cheap enough.
(Photo credits: GM)
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In retrospect, Uplander sounds like a Wish.com Highlander (the pseudo-SUV styling does nothing to help).
Rob Ford drove one of these before he spent that mayor money to upgrade to an Escalade. I make no comment about impaired judgement.
Sorry, crash ratings be damned, the first gen dustbuster minivans were WAY better looking than these. Styling truly ahead of their time.
I’ll just say it. Canadians are brain damaged. These were like some drugs, just because they were for sale does not mean it’s ok to use them…Sorry, not sorry.
I forgot about these. I grew up when these vans were sold new, but no one I knew had a GM van. Odysseys, Siennas, Voyagers, even Windstars were a common sight. But nobody around me bought these ugly things.
Important to note that these also launched right as the SUV was really taking over, and it seemed like anyone who could afford it was getting Suburbans instead.
Same here. Due to the UAW plant in town with a Chrysler affiliation, Chrysler products were was the most common domestic you’d see in the area.
But the area did used to have a GM plant, and there were still plenty of former GM employees with discounts to use. From the Dustbusters to these, there wasn’t much adoption.
These things were ugly; not BMW pig nostril ugly, but still rather hideous.
I always thought GM just shoved a crossover style front end on their old van to try and eke a few more years out of them before giving up entirely. And the front end they chose was daggy as hell.
I appreciate the instinct to defend the underappreciated, but no, these were trash. Typical build quality for GM of that era, including alarming tendency to rust. Lazy design – the weird cargo organizer increased liftover height AND wasn’t well integrated so you would lose stuff in the side. Awful to drive in, awful to ride in, weirdly loud for some reason – it had SO MUCH wind noise for some reason.
This was the car you bought when your Dodge dealer ran out of Canadian Value Package Grand Caravans.
To be fair, Ford also sold the Freestar which was arguably somehow even worse.
Wife’s family had one as a rental years back with less than 5k miles and the air conditioning failed. They still make fun of it. I see a few of these scooting about my neighborhood with USPS. Some of them look rough but apparently haven’t caught on fire yet like some of their Grumman LLV lot mates.
They were however, as ugly as I remember.
Indeed. Piggy faces.
I still come across these in the wild every now and then. Especially the Chevy versions. They just look… terrible in person. If you’re driving a minivan, you’ve already given up a lot of aesthetic value to have that level of utility in transporting your family. But those were a bridge too far.
They were cheapened-out versions of cheaped-out vans to begin with.
The Chinese Buick minivans are much better. The GL8 Avenir is nice 🙂
If a buyer chose one of these brand new in 2005, but could afford a Sienna/Odyssey, they made a bad choice. Same argument for the Ford Freestar.
I worked at a Chevy dealer as a detailer for approx. 6 months while in school. A salesman would bring the one Uplander in inventory to us every few weeks to charge the battery, wash off the dust, and scrape the water spots off the windows. Poor thing sat there for my entire tenure.
I enjoy these more sympathetic takes – it’s a refreshing break from the “negativity masquerading as discerning taste” attitude that is all too common.
May I suggest the final-generation Buick Riviera (1995-1999) for a future installment of this series? From its unusual styling, to the fact that it was one of the last survivors of the American personal luxury car category, and that it is largely forgotten today, I’ve always thought it was an interesting car. I very nearly bought one last year (and honestly it’s still on my “if I had infinite money and garage space” list).
Dude, 100% agree on those Rivieras! They were basically a 2 door Aurora but with a more reliable engine.
I vote yes on the Rivieras too. I flipping loved the dashboard.
The Aurora (at least the first-gen one) would be a great topic for this series too. Was thinking about one of those instead of the Riviera, but I got scared by the Northstar-derived engine…
The Aurora’s were certainly cool as well (1st gens, not so much on the 2nd gens). I did have a friend with a bit of a scary story with one though… she was driving it home and had just exited from a 75 mph freeway on to a slower county road in a rural area and both airbags just… went off. No crash, no bump, nothing… just boom. The car was in good shape, and I still don’t quite understand how that happened, but man… if it had happened just 15 minutes prior on the interstate, she might not have lived through it.
1st Gen Auroras did have a rare autobahn/sport package that (I believe) removed the speed limiter entirely
I still see these in and around DC and will now go from not appreciating them at all to appreciating them an infinitesimal amount. My company has several offices that are in pretty rough parts of town and whenever I go to them I’m often treated to encountering some curious zombies of cheap cars past. I always like to think about what stories those cars would share if they could and how much work it’s probably taken to keep a 20 year old Kia Rio that has never seen preventative maintenance in its life on the road…
Although the late 90s/early 2000s luxury cars that kick around probably have even more fascinating histories. I encountered a hooptie BMW M car recently that had the damn SMG transmission and tags that had expired years ago near my office. Imagine what that car would tell you if it could talk…
My parents and grandfather had a previous-gen Montana and SWB Venture, respectively. At the time, I hated those vans, but looking back, they were pretty solid machines. Both had head gaskets replaced under the Dex-Cool thing, but with exception to that, both easily made it to 175k+ without any issues. The 3800 in the Montana was stellar. As I recall the Venture only had the 3400 which seemed underpowered. The greatest thing about these vans (and particularly the longer Montana), was their ability to road trip. On the highway, the Montana routinely scored 25-26mpg on various trips we took, fully loaded with kids, cargo, etc.the gearing was great…at 75mph, I recall the engine was lazing along at like 1500rpm. In high school I drove it some when my VW was broken, and one time I let ‘er rip on the highway. It was still pulling at 120mph before I got scared and let off. The interiors, at least on the previous generation, were utter crap, but that’s no surprise to anyone. Never liked the CSV-era but then again, it wasn’t the worst thing GM ever did.
All vans of that gen had the 3400 – only the 92-95 Dustbusters offered the 3800.
Which was a bit strange on GM’s part considering the Chrysler vans added the 3.8 for 1994, and then Ford rolled out the Windstar with the 3.8 standard. I guess GM’s argument was they had a standard V6 against Chrysler’s I4, and a more powerful V6 at that as Chrysler’s 3.8 didn’t match it until 1998 (and then GM added 5 more hp the next year). Then against Ford, they added the 3.0L Vulcan with 150 hp as the base motor just after that.
An ex-rental Montana was one of our family’s vans too and one of the cars I learned to drive on. I think it nickel and dimed us more than the Grand Voyager it replaced, but it held up a little better overall for at least a few thousand miles extra.
I would agree with this. My mother had a 2002-ish Chevy Venture when I was in high school. Yeah, the interior may not have been the most top tier place to be, but the van did exactly what it needed to do: haul people and cargo while being reasonably economical and reliable. That Chevy managed to survive 260k miles and three teenage drivers before getting traded off. And for that I’ve always respected it.
I remember trying to sell the Saturn version for a short period of time back in the day before the dealership I worked at switched over to VW. Our favorite feature is how the automatic sliding doors would open randomly during test drives.
Was there a cargo version of the Uplander that was sold to the USPS? Or was that the Venture?
You’re correct, there were indeed cargo Uplanders that the postal service used.
(hey I made a Big Bill Hell’s reference earlier too!)
True on the Canadian aspect – buyers up there were always kinder to minivans in general, and the value they usually offer. A friend of mine’s retired grandparents that live up there still have such a Chevy, that has been surviving. Even in the U.S. depending on the van, GM hung their hat on having a standard rear-seat DVD player.
The price explains why they sold, sure. Repackaging old bones does work, we see that today from trucks (Tacoma, Frontier) to sporting cars (Nissan again with the Z comes to mind). For the CSVs the material quality of the interior was much improved so there was some effort there.
But somehow it seemed like they engineered more quality issues elsewhere in the process – electrical like the power doors (they still couldn’t get them right after over a decade), or assembly – I remember walking around a Relay on the showroom floor and realizing it had the Saturn badge on the driver’s door, but not on the passenger door (as you can see the placement in that Relay pic). I’ll repackage a comment I had put on the shitbox showdown with the Uplander a couple weeks ago…
Ford did a similar approach with repackaging the old van, but put more effort behind the Freestar with fold-in-floor 3rd row, power tailgate, and curtain airbags, but that too was not as serious an effort as the class leaders by then. Or even Chrysler with Stow n Go.
For GM, the 2nd-row seats were perhaps the most obvious sign of how phoned in it was. The standard seats were just the same type of modular buckets they offered for years, minus the center seat, probably because they would have had to engineer a 3-point seatbelt to be competitive (not sure if it’s was also just law by then for all seatbelts to be 3-point). The seat comfort was probably most comparable to the Chrysler Stow-n-Go seats. The optional captains chairs were better, but because they didn’t offer curtain airbags in these vans like everyone else did, they packaged the same side airbags from the front seats, in the 2nd row. (Yeah a Sienna has that too now, but it has curtain airbags for all 3-rows – and it did back then too.)
Supposedly a Lambda-based minivan was in the works too, but canceled because of costs of the whole project – and probably GM knew deep down they wouldn’t make a dent in the segment.
Speaking of Lambda based vans, I saw an, albeit current gen, Traverse handicap conversion with at least one sliding door a few weeks ago. It didn’t look too bad.
My parents had an older generation Montana and swapped it out for a 2005 Buick Terraza after the Pontiac started returning to the earth…. I grew up driving the Montana and even took my drivers tests in it! (had to parallel park a minivan) The Buick is an interesting beast, the engine won’t quit but the body is really letting go now that it’s 18 years old. My parents van is the 3.5L FWD version long wheel base, as I understand it the AWD was a Buick only option, at least here in Canada. I’ve got good memories in both vans but I don’t think I’d ever call them underrated, the competition at the time was also pretty bad though, I’m starting to wonder if this generation of vans is what caused everyone to hate them? That’s what it’s done for me at least.
These minivans look like big stupid dogs. The dustbusters were overstyled and these were just not styled at all.
I miss having a minivan available for people who come from the Land of Up.
This was the quandary GM made for itself. They sold perfectly adequate mass market cars that you could always buy at a discount, but it’s hard to make a profit when so much of your lineup is being sold at a loss. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that GM went bankrupt during that era.
So, I worked on a friend’s Uplander when it was only a few years old and just out of warranty. I am not brand loyal, but I have always had a soft spot for GM and an appreciation for their consistent and reliable mistakes and ensuing issues. That Uplander had all the issues I expected, and had taken care of on my own vehicles in the past, so working on it was a relative breeze. After a Saturday of wrenching I had serviced the engine and transmission, fixed the sliding door rollers, replaced the stepper motors in the gauge cluster, and fixed some minor leaks in the cooling system. It was easy and cheap. The problem was the typical cheap GM plastics that made the interior look like it has easily 200,000 more miles on it than it did. The friends kept the van for another five years until that 4T65E did what they love to do and lose most of the forward gears, at which point they went to a Honda. When asked later between which vehicle they liked more, they immediately complained about how crappy the Uplander was despite the Honda having easily five times as many issues in the first year as they had had in the nearly ten years they had the Uplander. Poor ugly Uplander got no love…
Indeed, building on the bones of the previous model is exactly what allowed favorable pricing. I wonder if low US interest rates at that time simply allowed American families to afford the upgrade even though the GM products were decent value for the money. IIRC by 2004 the US economy was on an upswing, so people weren’t feeling the pinch.
In general this was the quandary GM found itself in for decades: they weren’t good enough at production to build high quality for cheap OR medium quality for dirt cheap, so their cars tended to be medium quality, cheap but not that cheap. Meanwhile, they had too much institutional pride to abandon the top of the market where they were really uncompetitive, but they didn’t have enough pride to reject embarrassing brand engineering. Just year after year of neither fish nor fowl, with just enough genuinely good products to keep the whole thing moving forward—at least until the Great Recession.
My biggest complaint against these things was the Relay signifying the accelerating demise of Saturn. It didn’t go with anything in the lineup, it wasn’t a unique take on a GM playform like how the Ion was differentiated from the Cobalt and G5, it wasn’t an almost-premium captive import – or even look like one – like the L-Series or Astra. It was just, a minivan, plus some spare tooling and an excess of Saturn badges.
I think the article hit on what the Relay offered that none of the other GM vans did: Saturn dealers.