Four problems related to battery dead have been reported for the 2004 Saturn ION. The most recently reported issues are listed below.
I pulled into a restaurant and the car was fine, when I went to leave the car would not start. I had aaa come out, they told me that I need to have the car looked at. The steering wheel will turn, but the key will not. The battery is not dead as all the lights work for the car but the key is not working. This problem happened once before but after waiting a few minutes the car simply started. Now my car has to be towed to a garage, to be fixed. I looked online and have seen many other 2004 Saturn Ion owners have the same problem turning their car on in the cold.
Bought the car under warranty, no crank/no start because of faulty passlock system. Saturn "rebooted the computer" (saturns words). This was in may of 06. Strangely, the car has "died" in at least 3 driveways as though the battery was dead. I have taken the car to a garage and had the battery tested and it was fine. Recently, when the weather is cold, the car will no crank/no start and throw the passlock code. On the dash, sometimes it says service engine it may or may not reset after 10 minutes. The vehicle has become unreliable as I am never sure if I am going to get to work on time or not. I called Saturn last week. Apparently Saturn is aware of the problem, but since they are going to inconvenience me to drive 200 miles to the dealership and then charge me $100 to walk through the door land then another $1000 on top of that to "fix" the car' they know they are making money off their faulty equipment. I refuse to pay for it, but in the meantime my car continues to not start if it is zero degrees.
My trunk has started to get water in it. This caused my battery to fail on several occasions. Now that it is winter I had to replace my battery because it froze . The entire inside of my trunk is damaged.
I own a 2004 Saturn Ion 3. I purchased this Feb, 2006. December of 2006 my car failed to start. I called for help and by the time it arrived, the car started on its own. On Feb 7th, 2007, the car failed to start again. It did not seem like a battery failure. I found the TSB 040845005 online. I called corporate Saturn customer service and they "logged my complaint". They were not very helpful and simply directed me to call the local dealer. I called the local dealership service manager and explained the situation. I took the car in and they ran diagnostics. The issue was indeed the same issue in the TSB, which is ignition switch failure. Because they need to replace the ignition switch, they also need to reset the passlock. I was told that this would cost me $291. 00. I was also told that they could not give me any kind of a break on the cost of replacement as those type of decisions were made on a case by case basis and per the service manager "you have over 40,000 miles on the car" (I have 30,700 and have owned the car just short of 12 months), so they cannot provide me with any assistance. I am very disappointed in this as Saturns are supposed to be reliable and this is a known part failure.