LS-Swapped Saturn Sky Is Exactly How GM Should Have Built it
Petite Corvette.
Life is about the little things, like smelling the flowers, walks on the beach, and big V8s inside of tiny cars. Now you too can live out your wildest roadster dreams with an LS-equipped version of one of GM's best roadsters: the Saturn Sky.
Now-defunct carmaker Saturn was GM's answer to battling the rise of imports for most of its life. And while the brand may have gone belly-up in 2010, one of its last creations will forever remain one of its best. From 2007 until 2010, Saturn sold 34,415 examples of the Sky, but sibling brand Pontiac sold nearly double of its Solstice counterpart, making the twin-sister roadster more popular of the two. And while the factory performance-tuned variant of the Sky's 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder produced 290 horsepower, people still wanted more.
A performance shop in Cornelius, North Carolina called Mallett Performance picked up the torch and went to work, producing 100 examples of high-horsepower roadster goodness. This 2007 Saturn Sky is just one of them, and it's now for sale on Bring a Trailer.
Mallet begins each Sky swap by pulling the factory-equipped powerplant from the car and installing an LS-series GM crate engine of the customer's choosing. For this particular Sky, the owner chose Mallett's 427 LS7 package, which, if you couldn't guess it by the name, includes the 7.0-liter LS7 V8 commonly found in the C6 Corvette Z06
Aside from the glorious rumble of four extra cylinders, the $47,000 upgrade includes the 505-horsepower engine, a manual six-speed Tremec transmission, a LuK Pro Gold clutch, a 3.73 rear differential, and a plethora of other go-fast bits.
The suspension is tuned by Mallett to efficiently put the power to the ground, including Penske performance shocks and springs. The seller notes that polyurethane bushings are installed in the rear control arms and differential mounts as well. And to make sure the roadster stops on a dime with all of that extra power, Mallett installed a complementing big brake kit.
The car also comes with three sets of wheels, the 19-inch Forgeline multi-piece wrapped in Pirelli rubber (pictured), one-piece forged Mallett wheels with the original Michelin tires and a set of factory Saturn wheels with Goodyear RS-A tires.
The subcompact Kappa platform wasn't GM's most popular, but pair it with the heart of a Corvette and it's essentially everything that a modern-day sports car enthusiast could ask for. And if we can stuff a Hellcat engine in an old Miata, we can sure as hell enjoy this piece of art.
At the time of writing, savvy buyers have bid the car up to $30,001 with SIX days left on the auction. Given that this 13-year-old car only has 6,000 miles on the odometer, the current price seems like a steal, especially when you consider that the original price tag of the Sky plus the cost of the Mallett conversion was no less than $75,000. Previously sold examples of the Mallett Sky and Solstice have sold for $25,500, $28,250, $30,000, and $36,000 on Bring a Trailer. Expensive, but something tells us that these tiny balls of power are worth every penny.
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