I just want to say, since I graduated college in 1993, I've had only Saturns. I've gotten a total of 400,000 miles from both, 190,000 from the first (1993 SL) and 210,000 from the second (1996 SL) and only spent about $10,000 total in maintenance. I'm still driving the second 150 miles a day and getting 35 - 40 MPG. Great car as long as it's not a 2000 or higher...
Saturn was, at one time a great car and a great company... division of GM. I'm sorry to see the slide.
Courtesy of GM
Launching a Rocket: The first Saturn rolls off the assembly line in 1990
BUSINESS: THE AUTO INDUSTRY
Saturn was Supposed To Save GM
Instead, GM crushed Saturn. Here's how.
Published Apr 4, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Apr 13, 2009
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It's hard to remember a time when the top man at GM was the most celebrated industrialist in America, maybe even the world. But that was the case on Jan. 8, 1985, when Roger B. Smith convened a press conference in Detroit to make what he billed a "historic announcement."
Smith was a man given to grand gestures. The pink-cheeked, squeaky-voiced executive, once branded the "cherubic chairman" by BusinessWeek, who had taken the helm in 1981, had already ordered a sweeping reorganization of GM's unwieldy structure. He'd also made bold investments in robotics, space satellites and data processing—buying whole companies, like Ross Perot's Electronic Data Systems, and Hughes Aircraft Co., instead of merely contracting for their services.
But on this wintry day in Detroit, Smith would make his biggest gamble yet: unveiling the Saturn, GM's first new brand in 70 years. More than just a car, it would be a stand-alone subsidiary—using innovative technology by workers and managers engaged in unprecedented joint decision making. "Saturn is the key to GM's long-term competitiveness, survival and success," Smith said. Its mission: "to develop and produce an American-made small car that will be fully competitive with the best of the imports … [and] affirm that American ingenuity, American technology and American productivity can once again be the model and the inspiration for the rest of the world."
Smith was making Saturn not just a car but a crusade, and the country rushed to join. GM was inundated with thousands of unsolicited job applications. Seven governors went on "The Phil Donahue Show" to plead publicly for the Saturn plant to be located
in their state. More than a dozen others trekked to Detroit to state their case in person. Smith eventually decided to put the plant in the bucolic Tennessee hamlet of Spring Hill—some 45 miles south of Nashville, and nearly 500 miles from the ossified traditions of Detroit that the chairman wanted to shake to their very core.
Twenty-four years later, Smith has passed away, and his dream is in shambles. GM is fighting for its life; its CEO, Rick Wagoner, was ousted by the federal government as part of a bailout effort that may yet involve bankruptcy and billions more in taxpayer dollars. The Obama administration is contemplating splitting GM in two, dividing the "good" from the "bad"—a plan that, if adopted, would essentially treat Saturn as a toxic asset to be sold off like so much subprime mortgage debt. GM has 60 days to submit a new plan to the White House, but its first one called for Saturn to be phased out by 2011, unless a "Hail Mary" play by its dealers to buy the brand succeeds, or a better alternative can be found. (A GM spokesman said: "We're selling the cars we have and waiting to see what the franchise-operations team can come up with.") The plant in Spring Hill, once a place where giddy owners traveled from all over to meet the folks who made their beloved cars, no longer produces Saturns, cranking out Chevys instead on the days when it is on line at all.
Saturn was hardly a panacea. But its fall to earth, more than $5 billion in GM money later, is about far more than the flameout of one brand. In the eyes of some automotive analysts, Saturn represents a major missed opportunity for Detroit to place a sustained bet on fuel-efficient cars that would compete with the Japanese—and to recalibrate the bitter business-labor relationship in ways that could have had far-reaching implications for the entire industry. Saturn was never able to surpass the Japanese in technology, as Smith had hoped. But the competitive knives Saturn faced within GM did far more damage than any threat from overseas: execs who felt the auto giant already had too many brands and factories; dealers resentful of Saturn's product-development dollars; and a labor union whose leadership came to regard the brand's workplace innovations as collaborations with the enemy. It did not help matters that from the mid-1990s until just recently, Americans turned away from small cars in favor of trucks and SUVs.
Smith wanted to remake GM in Saturn's mold, but the opposite happened. "This is a real tragedy," says Prof. Saul Rubinstein of the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University, who coauthored a book on Saturn. The lesson for GM and its American rivals now struggling to stay in business, he says, is that when they launch daring innovations, they need the will and a way to ensure that those ideas don't get drowned by the corporate mainstream.
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