The Unexpected American Car With A J35 Honda Engine Under The Hood

The real auto-whisperers among us seem to have an uncanny ability to identify different vehicles. They can tell the difference between model years at a glance, they know which stock engine a given vehicle will have came with, and may even be able to list the full repertoire of engine options provided to boot. The fact is, though, the world of car manufacturing has a way of throwing surprising curveballs at us.

Those of us who aren't blessed with such extensive knowledge would probably venture that you'd find a J35 Honda engine under the hood of a Honda vehicle. Which, of course, you would: A wide range of Honda models are powered by the J35, including some of the marque's biggest names like the Accord, Odyssey, and Legend. One interesting piece of trivia, though, is that you'll also find one inside a much more surprising vehicle: the Saturn Vue.

The Vue, while quite the success story for Saturn, wouldn't typically be known as a very surprising vehicle. It set out to be a rather standard SUV and it certainly achieved just that. What was the reason, then, for American and Japanese technology colliding under its hood? Here's why the Vue was equipped with a J35, the deal between the two companies that put the engine there, and a brief rundown of the story of Saturn's Vue as a whole. 

The early 2000s saw the meteoric rise of the SUV. The biggest automakers wanted to be sure they had an offering in that sphere to capitalize on that, with Hyundai's Tucson and Honda's CR-V being two prominent examples of the compact SUV. Saturn, meanwhile, decided to unleash the Vue. 

The Vue made its debut in the 2002 model year, and wasn't quite the hefty SUV that some buyers at the time were in the market for. It was a compact model, at 71.5 inches wide and 181.3 inches long, but in tandem with the unibody design (shared with the Pontiac Torrent, Chevrolet's Equinox and the Opel Antara), this made it quite an economical purchase. It had not inconsiderable power for a vehicle of its size and its time, offering torque of 195 lb-ft and a horsepower of 181 from its 3.0-liter engine. Starting with the 2004 model year, however, the Vue started using a more powerful, far more surprising engine: the 3.5 liter Honda V6 known as the J35.

No other General Motors vehicle would be equipped with this Honda engine, a ULEV model that pushed the torque to 242 lb-ft and horsepower to 250. In July 2003, Car And Driver dubbed this a "Hondafied Vue," a model that came about as a result of a surprising deal between the two automakers.

Saturn's Vue would use the Honda engine between the '04 and '07 model years. In 2007, the second generation of the Vue arrived, bringing with it a larger design (derived from the Opel Antara, pictured here). Though this new version of the Vue wasn't equipped with a Honda engine, the Vue family as a whole is a star of obscure auto trivia for having just that. The question of why it had one in the first place, however, is an interesting one. Per a Honda news release from January 2017, "GM and Honda collaborated in a powertrain cross-supply arrangement in 1999 under which Honda manufactured 50,000 V-6 engines for the Saturn VUE and Honda received diesel engines from GM's Isuzu affiliate for use in Europe."

This would not be the only collaboration between the companies over the years, as they developed something of a close working relationship. Indeed, that very news release was to mark the "establishment of the auto industry's first manufacturing joint venture to mass produce an advanced hydrogen fuel cell system that will be used in future products from each company."

The Vue had a short life with Honda's J35, but then it was quite short-lived in general. The second generation model only lasted until 2010, with the flop of the Saturn brand as a whole meaning that it had ceased production in October of the previous year.