Our LW-200 is starting to annoy us. Seems like there is a terrible shortage of knowledgeable [saturn] mechanics that know anything about this car and it's manual transmission.
Since just under 30,000 miles the clutch has acted up/weird on us. Essentially it first showed up after driving about 90 miles on the freeway, I went to put down the clutch to downshift and it went to the floor. I was able to speed shift and pumping the clutch pedal seemed to maybe make a little difference.
On very cold mornings the clutch acts up in the reverse.... the pedal travel is only 1-3 inches to fullly disengage, this floating enageg point of the pedal makes for some comical backing the car out of the driveway -- unfortunately my spouse doesn't find me laughing at her stalling the car very amusing.
So this clutch issue has been going on for about 25,000 miles now. Saturn has looked at it at least three times, never finding anything wrong. They did a bleed on whatever system the clutch runs off and it seemed to improve for awhile.
Then about 50,000 the power steering started to groan loudly and intermittently lose power-assist -- again mostly only in the mornings, and only noticeable when turning the wheel left (where it would violently vibrate between assisted and non-assisted turning) while groaning and creaking. After warming up the power steering behaves.
So, the $75,000 question is does anyone know if the power-assist and clutch share a hydraulic assembly in the manual transmission LW-200 ?
By the way, the final straw was yesterday the wife called to say the A/C quit. I had complained many times about the compressor engaging only to have it dismissed as normal sounds and behavior (the computer would cycle the a/c compressor shortly after starting the engine, which I understand could be normal, however it would sometimes do so too early or not compensate with enough throttle rpm and nearly stall out the engine).
So we dropped it off yesterday and hope for some mechanic-savant to actually locate the real issue(s).