Saturn Corporation

» see saturn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

General Motors incorporated Saturn on 7 January 1985 as a wholly owned subsidiary with its own plant and its own labor agreement. The premise was that GM in the 1980s could not build a competitive small car and that everyone senior enough to matter knew it. The proposed fix was to stand a car company up outside the existing organization and let it write its own rules, and Roger Smith signed off on billions of dollars to find out.

The plant went to Spring Hill, Tennessee, a long way from Detroit in every sense that mattered to the project. The UAW agreement negotiated for it was unlike anything else in the American industry: a handful of job classifications instead of dozens, and workers on salary with a portion of it at risk against targets. Union representatives sat in on decisions that were normally management's alone. The first car came off the line on 30 July 1990 and went on sale that fall.

Saturn was sold in the United States and Canada and essentially nowhere else, so no part of this arrived in Turkey, and nothing about the cars themselves would have been worth importing if it had. What makes the thing worth a grave from here is the org chart. Saturn is a large company deliberately building a smaller company inside itself to escape its own processes, which is a move software organizations spend a great deal of money re-attempting, usually with the same result.

~ the dossier ~

~ spring hill ~

The cars had polymer body panels hung on a steel space frame, which meant they did not dent in parking lots and did not rust, and which became the single fact every Saturn owner could tell you. The engineering was otherwise unremarkable and the assembly quality was genuinely good, better than the GM average by a distance that embarrassed the rest of the corporation.

The retail side was the real product. Fixed prices, posted on the window, with no negotiation and no commission structure that rewarded a salesperson for beating you. Anyone who has bought a car in a market where haggling is the norm understands immediately what the fixed price was actually selling. Saturn dealers also handled recalls by calling owners personally and by washing the car while it was in, which sounds trivial until you count how many people bought a second one because of it.

~ the homecoming ~

In June 1994 Saturn invited its customers to the factory. Somewhere between twenty-eight and forty-four thousand people drove to Spring Hill, Tennessee and paid thirty-four dollars a head for a Wynonna concert and a tour of the line that had built their car. There were about 605,000 Saturns on American roads at the time, and a meaningful fraction of the owners got in one and drove to a factory town in the middle of a summer to look at it.

That was the peak. Sales hit 286,003 for the year and never went higher. The problem arrived quietly: the S-series was not replaced on any normal cycle, because the capital that would have paid for the replacement kept getting reallocated to trucks and SUVs, which is where GM's margin lived through the 1990s. By 1999 Saturn was selling a car five years past due against Civics and Corollas that had been redesigned twice.

~ the penske deal ~

What GM did instead of investing was fill the showrooms with Europe. The Aura was an Opel Vectra and the Astra was an Opel Astra shipped over from Belgium, while the Vue and the Sky shared their platforms with cars Opel sold in Europe. Some of them were decent. What none of them carried was the original argument, and the dealer network built on that argument was now selling rebadges at a premium it could no longer explain.

GM went into bankruptcy in 2009 and put Saturn up for sale. Penske Automotive Group agreed in June to take the brand and the dealers and to buy cars from GM on contract while it lined up a permanent manufacturer. On 30 September 2009 Penske pulled out, because the manufacturer it was counting on would not sign. Production stopped on 7 October 2009 and the last franchise agreements ran out on 31 October 2010, closing roughly 350 dealerships with about 13,000 jobs attached to them. Spring Hill is still open and still a GM plant, currently building Cadillacs.

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