Letter to Click and Clack (the Car Talk guys)

Good Day,

A friend of mine, who is a former Dodge Dart owner, suggested that you might be interested in my car story.

I own a 1995 Saturn SL1 which, at 2.5 years and 49K miles, has developed a problem. The ALLDATA tecinical service bulliten 94-T-48A lists it as "a clearence condition between the pistion pin and the connecting rod bushing." Which, translated into English, means $1100.

My dealership says that they've seen this problem 4 other times. This suggests (based on their 1200/year sales volume) that this is hapening to something like 1 in 600 Saturn engines.

I find this failure rate alarming. Neither the dealership nor Saturn proper is willing to quote more specific statistics.

My question: Can you tell me how many Saturn engines, under normal wear, start to self destruct at only 50K miles? Am I just really luckey? Is this a different kind of car company, or what?

Thanks,

Paul

PS. The Dart had a more reliable engine than my Saturn.