“Maybe we were led to expect too much.” Even on the first page of the first test of GM’s all-new Saturn in our November 1990 issue, the sense of disappointment was palpable. For years, we’d been told Saturn would be a wondercar built in a factory of the future, something that would show the world Detroit could build a better small car than the Japanese for less money. GM boss Roger B. Smith insisted in 1985 that Saturn would be “a complete, radical change from anything going on anywhere in auto manufacturing.”
But from behind the wheel of the early-build sedans and coupes we sampled at the GM Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan, in the fall of 1990, it certainly didn’t feel that way. “We came away from the experience somewhat frustrated,” formerMotorTrendeditor Daniel Charles Ross wrote. “While it’s a legitimate alternative for many import intenders … [Saturn] shows not only how far GM has traveled, but that it still has a ways to go.”
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The Saturn story began in mid-1982, not long after Smith, a GM lifer who had spent his entire career in the finance department, became the chairman and CEO of the world’s largest and richest automaker. Although argumentative and autocratic and steeped in the institutional arrogance that pervaded GM at the time, Smith was nonetheless aware the company faced enormous challenges.
As Alex Taylor III wrote inSixty to Zero: An Inside Look at the Collapse of General Motors—and the Detroit Auto Industry, Smith knew GM was “too inward looking, too provincial, and too leaden.” However, his determination to modernize GM kicked off a botched reorganization of the entire company and the disastrous GM-10 midsize car program. It also led him to enthusiastically latch on to an audacious idea proposed by the advanced vehicle engineering and advanced manufacturing engineering groups at the GM Technical Center in Warren, Michigan: Adopt a completely new way of engineering and manufacturing cars and use it to build the one product GM knew its existing process couldn’t create, a small car that could make money and compete with the Japanese imports.
The Saturn name was first attached to the project in July 1982, and although the logo later created for the division was an abstraction of the planet and its rings, the name was originally a reference to the Saturn V rocket, which had helped America beat Russia to the moon. In the context of an American automaker that had been losing market share to the Japanese, it was an obvious metaphor.
Saturn prototypes and concepts were running by late 1984, before Saturn Corporation was founded and before Spring Hill, Tennessee, was confirmed as the site for its high-tech plant. The Saturn factory would be highly automated, to the point, Smith said, where the lights would switch off at 4 in the afternoon, everyone would go home, and the plant would run itself, churning out Saturns through the night.
That vision of the factory drove some of the key design features of the original Saturn sedan and coupe. Bolting plastic body panels onto a steel space frame dramatically reduced cost and complexity in the paint shop, for example, and potentially allowed for quicker and easier styling changes. The lost-foam casting technique used for the engine block, cylinder heads, and transmission casing meant these parts could be made in a cheaper, more compact facility than traditional sand-cast foundries, and it produced parts that were lighter and required less final machining.
Using front-wheel drive and built on a wheelbase 6 inches longer than a contemporary Honda Civic’s, with a close-ratio five-speed manual or four-speed automatic transmission, a fully independent suspension, rack-and-pinion steering, and the option of a twin-cam, 16-valve I-4 engine, the Saturn was certainly a bold step forward for a company whose most recent “home-grown” subcompact was the Chevette, a car so laughably antique it still had rear-drive and a live rear axle. But while GM might have thought Saturns to be wondercars, others outside of the Detroit bubble simply … wondered.
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“Those of us who live here in the heartland of imports,”MTeditor Bob Nagy wrote in the April 1991 issue after comparing the top-spec Saturn SL2 sedan with Honda’s Civic EX, Nissan’s Sentra GXE, and Toyota’s Corolla LE, “can’t help but think that Saturn … will meet with greater success in snaring current owners of domestic vehicles than luring away droves of satisfied Honda, Nissan, and Toyota owners.”
To be fair, the first Saturns, particularly in the SL2 sedan and SC2 coupe versions powered by the 124-hp, 122-lb-ft twin-cam engine, were not bad cars. We praised their performance, handling, and poised ride, the latter of which was a cut above those of Japanese rivals. But rear headroom in the sedan was surprisingly tight, and the long-stroke 1.9-liter engine, both in twin-cam and 85-hp, 107-lb-ft single-cam format, suffered from annoying noise, vibration, and harshness throughout the rev range, especially under load.
Then there was the styling. After such a long gestation, the general vibe of the sedan’s styling seemed strangely unimaginative by 1990. And the fit and finish and ergonomics of the interior were subpar versus Japanese cars’. “As one might expect, Saturn made its more impressive statements trackside,” Nagy wrote in the April 1991 issue. “As we moved into the realm of the more subjective, people-oriented qualities, the pendulum began to swing in the opposite direction.”
Nagy’s comments added weight to the nagging doubts voiced by Ross in his story months earlier. “The creation of an all-new corporate culture,” Ross wrote, “doesn’t seem to have deflected all the hidebound ‘GM-ness’ the groundbreaking organization was supposed to avoid.”
The NVH problem was a case in point: It was bad enough that the cars had such an issue after GM spent years developing an all-new engine. But what made it worse was Smith had ordered the Saturn into production before engineers had perfected the torque-axis engine mount that would appear in the 1992 model year to mitigate the problem. Why? Because he wanted to drive the first production car off the line the day before he retired in July 1990. Smith’s photo op was deemed more important than ensuring Saturn customers got the best possible product.
“I don’t know who is the father of Saturn around here,” Smith had said when he announced the founding of Saturn Corporation in January 1985. “I think all of us are promoting it and pushing it. I’ve been hot for it, but I’m not going to tell you that I started it, because that wouldn’t be true.” Without Smith, though, Saturn would have just remained an idea. He authorized $900 million in 1982 for initial research and development, and three years later he committed a further $4.1 billion to turning that idea into GM’s first new car division since William Durant corralled Chevrolet into the stable in 1918.
GM finance guys were long used to rounding budget numbers to the nearest million, but this was serious money, and it came at a time when Smith had spent $2.5 billion on buying computer company EDS and was about to splurge $5.2 billion on Hughes Aircraft Corporation. Such was the power and wealth of GM at the time, however, that few analysts seemed bothered. That’s because to them Saturn wasn’t about the car at all.
“The product, the Saturn car, is the least important aspect of the Saturn program,” Phil Fricke, an analyst with Goldman, Sachs & Co. toldChicago Tribunewriter James Mateja in early 1985. “The car is simply a means to an end. I can’t emphasize enough that Saturn represents new manufacturing techniques, and whatever GM learns from this small car will be applied throughout the organization in all its cars, big and small.”
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David Cole, director of the office for the study of auto transportation at the University of Michigan, called Saturn an expensive experiment: “But $5 billion is a cheap price to pay for what will come out of this. What makes Saturn unique is that the importance of the car is integrated with the importance of its manufacturing. Before an automaker brings out a new car, it builds a prototype. Saturn is a prototype, the basic thread for a new GM.”
Except it wasn’t. Yes, the Spring Hill plant was very different from the old, run-of-the-mill GM factories, with higher levels of automation and a UAW workforce operating under a unique labor contract. But it was a lot closer in concept to a modern Toyota plant than the eye-popping factory of the future Smith said it would be. From the cars themselves to the way they were made, Saturn merely seemed to put GM in the game, not ahead of the pack, and even then only just. “Saturn was announced in 1983,” analyst Maryann Keller noted acerbically just before the car was launched. “How could you possibly have any concept of what the market would be like in eight years’ time?”
Although the automotive media was underwhelmed, American car buyers enthusiastically embraced the new cars. Although the Saturn’s plastic panels required larger than normal panel gaps and would ultimately not provide the low-cost face-lift capability GM thought they would, customers liked that they were rustproof and dent-resistant. And with a base price that undercut similarly equipped Civics, Sentras, and Corollas by at least a thousand bucks, it delivered on the promise of being price competitive with the Japanese imports.
Conquest sales ran as high as 81 percent in the early years, and even for existing GM customers, Saturn seemed like a car from a different company. “It was like a clean slate,” recalls Barbara Schreiber, who traded her clunky Oldsmobile Firenza on an SC2 she still owns. (Photos of her car are in this story’s gallery, and you can read more about it as well as what it’s like to drive today here.) “A different kind of car, different kind of company. All brand-new, clean slate, no shared parts from any other GM product. Everything was unique. And that’s what appealed to me a lot.”
But the thing customers really liked about Saturn was the buying experience. “When I first went into a Saturn retailer,” Schreiber recalls, “no one bothered you, there were no high-pressure salespeople around.” After inquiring about a test drive of a Saturn coupe, she was stunned when the salesperson asked her to wait a moment while it was washed for her. “That just blew me away.”
The cleverest part of the Saturn experiment was one of its simplest ideas. GM created a new sales network from scratch with handpicked dealers chosen based on high customer satisfaction. At a stroke, Saturn bypassed many in the existing GM network who’d grown fat and happy through the glory years, dealers used to simply ordering a bunch of cars and waiting for the customers to walk in and buy them like they always did rather than making sure those customers didn’t go shopping at a Toyota or Honda dealership. Saturn dealers became an industry benchmark for customer service.
“The biggest crime of Saturn is GM did not take all those learnings and force them into the rest of the dealer network,” says Jim Hall, a formerMotorTrendCar of the Year judge who spent a significant part of his career working at GM. “That’s the biggest single failing of Saturn.”
But it’s not why Saturn failed. Saturn failed because the moment Roger B. Smith left the 14th floor of 3044 West Grand Blvd. in the summer of 1990, GM’s old instincts kicked in. Saturn’s budgets were slashed as the bean counters chipped away at its massive overhead and attempted to placate the old GM divisions irked by Smith’s lavish spending on what they saw as a rival. By 1999, Saturn—the division that was going to radically reinvent not just GM but also automaking worldwide—was manufacturing a midsize car based on a 5-year-old Opel design in a factory constructed in 1947.
“Saturn was Roger Smith’s vision,” Hall says, “and when he was gone, nothing was going to keep it alive. Because to make it, he had created too many enemies.”
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