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.
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The first Saturn cars went on sale in the fall of 1990 to great fanfare. David Cole, head of the Center for Automotive Research, declared that Saturn "scares the liver" out of the Japanese. Another automotive expert, consultant James Harbour, predicted that "General Motors is about to kick butt from one end of this country to another." Body-part analogies were flying like welding sparks.
The Japanese were, in fact, a little worried. "We felt they had the opportunity to heal a lot of [GM's] wounds," recalls Gary Convis, a former senior U.S. manufacturing executive for Toyota, "and to be a very successful company." But when Honda engineers bought a Saturn and disassembled it, their fears abated. The dashboard had overlapping plastic panels that made it look cheap, and a harsh-sounding engine that stemmed from inferior motor mounts. The plastic-polymer doors, billed as a unique feature that wouldn't get dinged in parking lots, fit poorly. Again and again the surprised engineers exclaimed shinjirarinai, a term that means "unbelievable."
The technology may have been wanting, but the public-relations campaign was firing on all cylinders. The advertising showed Saturn workers, their dogs, their kids and the long white fence surrounding the factory. "I never felt this way about any job, any car, or anything I ever built," a factory technician declared in one ad. Saturn's tag line was: "A Different Kind of Company. A Different Kind of Car."
Dealers ate it up. Tom Zimbrick opened his Saturn store in Madison, Wis., on April 16, 1991. Disaster almost struck the first week, when all but one of the first 16 cars he sold had bad engine antifreeze that had been delivered by a Saturn supplier. Saturn replaced not only the coolant, but the entire car. "Customers said, 'Wow, they gave us a brand-new car'," Zimbrick recalls. "It created customer enthusiasm."
Every time a customer drove away in a brand-new Saturn, the dealership's employees would gather around the driveway to wave and applaud. Saturn's image got a further boost on June 7, 1993, when Vice President Al Gore visited the Spring Hill factory and declared that he wanted to "Saturnize" the federal government.
In June 1994 more than 40,000 Saturn owners and their families trekked to Spring Hill for the first Saturn Homecoming. It was the sort of "cult car" gathering usually attended by owners of 385-horsepower Corvettes, not by people who had purchased 85-horsepower econocars. The Saturn owners were feted with factory tours, country-music concerts and barbecues with the people who actually designed and built their cars. After selling fewer than 75,000 cars in 1991, its first full year, Saturn sold more than 286,000 in 1995, and topped the respected J.D. Power Customer Satisfaction Survey. But behind the scenes, the leaders of the UAW and General Motors were having increasing doubts about Saturn, for very different reasons.
Roger Smith's spending sprees had saddled GM with high costs and too much manufacturing capacity. In 1991 the company lost a then-record $4.45 billion. Smith's successor resigned under pressure after just two years at the helm. The board's new pick, Jack Smith (no relation to Roger), decided that GM had more pressing priorities than Saturn. So while Honda and Toyota were investing money to develop new versions of the Civic and Corolla, Saturn's cars went nearly a decade without being updated. The price of gas was dropping, along with the demand for small cars. But when Saturn executives sought funds to develop their own sport-utility vehicle, the response from GM headquarters was that customers should buy Chevy SUVs instead.
Meanwhile, the limitations of workplace democracy were becoming evident. Suppliers were chosen by a "point system" that awarded extra points to unionized companies, which sometimes got contracts despite higher costs or inferior quality. On occasion, labor's lead man at Saturn found himself dealing with team members who didn't want to return to the assembly line to, you know, build cars. "It was well intentioned, but it was like having two people share one pair of pants," says Convis, the former Toyota exec. "If one wants to go right and the other left, you can't move." Consensual decision making was valued at Japanese plants, too, but management retained the right to run the place.
At the same time GM's enthusiasm for Saturn was waning, a new power was emerging at UAW headquarters in Detroit. Stephen P. Yokich, who succeeded Ephlin, was his polar opposite. He was a trim fitness buff who was prone to violent outbursts of temper. Yokich had first made his mark at the union by leading a lengthy 1979 strike against International Harvester, from which the company never fully recovered.
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