(This was written in October 2009 at the time of Saturn’s death. Revised and updated in 2015 & 2016)
Friends, we are gathered together to pay our last respects to a fallen brother. Saturn was the love child of Roger Smith and Hal Riney; one was the Chairman of GM, a manufacturer of cars; the other, an ad man extraordinaire, a manufacturer of emotions and perceived needs. Let us savor their own words as we remember the brand that was Saturn, starting with these from brother Roger: (Saturn will be)“a quantum leap ahead of the Japanese, including what they have coming in the future. In Saturn we have GM’s answer – the American answer – to the Japanese challenge. It’s the clean-sheet approach to producing small cars that in time will have historic implications…(Saturn is) the key to GM’s long-term competitiveness, survival, and success.”
Ironically prophetic words, as it turned out.
So how exactly does a “clean-sheet” car end up sharing the same styling as a mid-size Oldsmobile that came out one year before the Saturn? I know there are explanations, but they don’t work. And the fact that it came out looking like a 9/10 Cutlass already predicts why Saturn was destined to fail. It’s not that the first Saturn’s styling was such a significant factor in itself, but it was profoundly symbolic of GM’s inability to escape itself, even when trying to hide deep in the green hills of Tennessee. Escape from stagnation and decline, and attempts at re-invention from the outside-in are as old as civilization itself. I’m not a historian, but finding a successful model for Roger’s folly eludes me. Weak organizations and civilizations get overrun by dynamic ones. Or actually fix what’s wrong at the core.
I do fancy myself a bit of an automotive historian though, but I’d almost forgotten this important tidbit: the Saturn was originally planned to be sold by Chevrolet. The early prototypes (above) even looked like a shrunken Chevy Cavalier. The whole concept of a completely separate division and dealer network came later in the Saturn’s protracted eight-year development. Now there’s some serious food for thought: how differently might things have turned out if it had been a Chevy. Because the decision to make the Saturn “A Different Kind of Car Company” not only reflected GM’s hubris and unrealistic expectations, it also directly created the mortal bind that Saturn inevitably found itself in.
Sure, in its heyday, the unique Saturn dealer experience and no-haggle pricing was a breath of fresh air. But these were both ephemeral; the pricing policy went out the window when small car sales weakened, and smart dealers of all persuasion began to improve aspects of the dealership experience.
The fact that GM thought that a key problem with losing the small car battle to the Japanese lay in the dealership experience rather than in the actual cars proves how delusional they really were. Especially so since Toyota and Honda dealers were notoriously rapacious at the time, often charging well above MSRP and forcing options on buyers who waited weeks to get their precious Accord or Corolla.
Saturn’s early days feel-good vibes had all the fervor of a quasi-religious cult. It was one of the great triumphs of advertising and marketing; a brilliant campaign engineered by San Francisco’s Hal Riney. GM did one thing right with its choice of Saturn’s agency.
Riney’s first big claim to fame was commissioning a song by Paul Williams for a Crocker bank commercial, “You’ve Only Just Begun”. It became the monster hit “We’ve Only Just Begun” by the Carpenters, perhaps the only song of its kind that started out as a commercial.
And he created the “It’s Morning Again in America” spot that helped get Ronald Reagan re-elected. Notice a recurring theme?
Yes, America loves re-inventions more than real inventions. But its attention span is short, and moves on to the next new thing pronto, especially so when the underlying product is less than memorable. Or when the next fad just around the corner is something different altogether, like trucks and SUVs. There you have it, a brief summation of Saturn’s woes. Now for the automotive details:
The Saturn wasn’t a terrible car. There, that didn’t hurt so much. Obviously, a distinctive and fresh design rather than an old Olds hand-me-down shrunken tee-shirt might have been in order. If you’re going to plow $5 billion (back when billions were still impressive amounts) into a new car, at least buy it a new suit. Was the Saturn competitive?
That’s highly debatable. It definitely wasn’t as good as its clearly stated target, the Honda Civic. It might have been close in some metrics to the gen2 Civic when the Saturn project started. But by the time Saturns finally arrived in the summer of 1990, the Civic was already nearing the end of its brilliant fourth generation, and heading for its fifth. That probably wasn’t on Roger’s mind when he spoke the words “a quantum leap ahead of the Japanese, including what they have coming in the future”. Not.
The Civic and Corolla were on a roll in the eighties and nineties, with a new generation arriving like clockwork every four years. And it showed, in their relentless refinement. The Civic engine hummed like a Stradivarius (a Japanese brand of sewing machine). The Saturn engine growled like a coffee grinder. Saturn interiors were always obviously cheap. Corolla interiors (of the nineties) weren’t. Honda and Toyota might have been worried about Saturn initially, as they were briefly about the Neon a few years later, but needn’t have. It was GM, after all.
Granted, there were many happy Saturn owners out there. It handled quite decently (no better than the Civic though), was commendably light and toss-able, and owners loved the plastic body panels, especially in the rust belt. The Saturn got good fuel economy, although nothing near the ridiculous 45 city/60 mileage EPA numbers GM promised during the long gestation (they ended up at 27/37; 21/31 adjusted in today’s EPA numbers).
The really big problem with Roger’s big Saturn idea is this: where do we go from here? Was that even considered? Ok, by throwing enough billions at it, GM showed that it could make a half-way decent, reasonably-competitive small car. Does that make a viable car company/division? I don’t think so (and didn’t at the time, contrary to the popular thinking). And that’s where the whole Saturn experiment begins to take its inevitable ugly turn.
When the market soon shifted away from small cars to bigger cars and SUVs, Saturn, as a separate entity but dedicated only to building and selling one sub-compact car, suddenly looked like an answer to a question that never should have been asked. GM had failed to consider the inevitable: what to do after the S-Class loses its initial burst of luster and the market shifts? What do we do now? Honda doesn’t just sell Civics; they also sell Accords.
So Saturn needed an Accord fighter too, and it got one, in the form of a plasticized Opel Vectra, dubbed the L Series. Well, if the S Series was several generations behind the Civic, the L Series was even further behind the class-leading Accord. Things were not going well at Saturn. The solution?
GM felt it had no choice but to develop a whole line of cars, SUVs, mini-vans, and even a sports car to try to back-stop Saturn’s decline – right during a time when development dollars at GM were getting scarce. In the meantime, the S Series soldiered along on the same platform for some ten years. It became an endless robbing Peter to pay Paul nightmare.
As well as a colossal joke: why was Saturn selling that rebadged mini-van piece of crap, the Relay? Or a gigantic seven seater SUV, the Outlook? Mission statement ADD at its worst.
If GM had stuck to their original plan of selling the Saturn as an entry level Japanese-fighter at Chevy dealers, the whole disaster could have been avoided. GM would have had an import fighter where it belonged: in its biggest dealer network. Yes, we might have missed out on the Spring Hill “Homecoming”, and the rest of Hal Riney’s hokey feel-good BS. But the warm and fuzzy memories of it were worth paying for with our tax dollars, no? It’s been estimated that the whole Saturn fiasco lost as much as $12 billion. One of the biggest industrial blunders and losses ever; the Edsel of the modern era.
Saturn’s inauspicious beginning reminds me of the song that made Hal Riney famous:
We’ve only just begun to live,
White lace and promises…
We’ll find a place where there’s room to grow,
And yes, We’ve just begun.
Yes, friends, it really is Mourning again in America.
I like the focus on the dealer.
However, I think a huge appeal of the Saturn was the no-haggle pricing. Legendary. couldn’t do that in a chevy dealer.
(I’ve always wondered if part of Japan’s Inc. success was luring the most cut-throat dealers in the 1970s to their brands. )
It seems to me the real sin wasn’t the car itself, but not improving it. Crazy ideas of upselling. I might note Honda is now the prime offender there.
“However, I think a huge appeal of the Saturn was the no-haggle pricing.”
That may have been the best marketing tactic ever employed by GM. When I was selling Chevys we had a list of average margins within the divisions and Saturn had the highest. I can’t remember the exact numbers but I do remenber being ticked off about having to bust my butt on $50 “mini deals” and wondering what the Saturn guys were getting paid to lead sheep to slaughter.
I never understood the whole “no-haggle” thing. You can get “no-haggle” pricing at any dealership. Just walk in, pay the sticker price, and then sit on a donut for the next two weeks. As much as I despise haggling, I would never be comfortable paying a price for a car that wasn’t negotiated. Like it or not, it’s just how that kind of transaction works.
I agree, dealers almost always mark everything way up.
However, haggling a regular person selling a car is pretty douchey unless they say its negotiable, and even then use your head and don’t offer nothing, offer what you would want.
“the unique Saturn dealer experience and no-haggle pricing was a breath of fresh air.”
“You can get “no-haggle” pricing at any dealership. Just walk in, pay the sticker price, and then sit on a donut for the next two weeks.”
We’re Saturn. We’re Different. We’re going to screw you, and we’re so proud of it that we advertise it. And you’re gonna love it, because you’re a spineless dolt who’d rather be screwed than shrewd.
The local Chevy dealer has been advertising “no haggle” pricing for over a decade. It works. There’s lots and lots of people who are psychologically unable to open their mouth and demand better.
Oof.. I should have posted my other comment here!
I’ve always been a bit hard on Saturn. From the start it really made no sense and when I saw my first one at a friends place I just didn’t like it. I couldn’t find it attractive and it didn’t seem to drive any better than the 10 year old “cheap” cars my friends and I were driving at the time.
I have to say, I never made the connection to the W body until I saw that pic…
Me neither, that’s uncanny.
Saturn had the highest margins? Higher than BOP and even Caddy? Yikes, that’s crazy.
Whats funny is that they did’nt start looking like a little Cutlass until late in the design cycle, originally it looked like a little Cavalier.
Take a look at the last Olds Firenza’s front 1988 I think, then compare to The SL. Once you see the evolution between the two, and combined with the family resemblance in profile view to the W-Cutlass, it seems as if the entire design was intended to be the next gen Firenza, but instead it was given to Saturn and the Firenza was axed.
I checked the ’88 and ’89 Firenza on google images. I wasn’t impressed. VERY superficial resemblance. I think the styling of the first gen Saturn is in a different league.
It’s actually the *first* Olds Firenza from 1982 that has the same front end as the first Saturn SL1. That’s a resemblance I immediately noticed when I first saw the Saturn, as well as the ’89 Cutlass greenhouse.
You must be talking about a prototype SLx. The first ones sold look nothing like this. (see the first Saturn photo in this article)
As I said in the other Saturn thread, I’ve never been a fan. Don’t regret it either. I was anti-GM back then – probably for the wrong reasons, as Chrysler had all my attention (and some of my money) and served us quite well. Ignorance is sometimes bliss, I suppose, but family came first in those days, cars – a distant third – but I still dreamed a lot, unfortunately, wishing wasn’t good enough!
Oooooh how that interior reminds me of my college buddy’s Saturn, complete with a hard flat plastic dash that you could store things on. And things would get stored on it, tons of opened (and left forgotten since) bills, plastic wraps from drive-through meals, crumbs, receipts, all of it flying in my face if I found myself in his car (mistake No 1) and decided to roll down the window (mistake No 2) as he was slamming through badly banging manual shifts.
He certainly didn’t improve my Saturn impression by keeping an already unattractive and obviously cheap car the utter waste and recycle basket that it was. That dash was the worst of it though. Ahh the old days.
The early ones seemed to eat timing chains from what I understand.
I remember reading contemporary reviews of the S series when it came out and was expecting a really nice little car when I finally rode in one. When I did, it was the same crappy GM rattly plastic I remembered from my Grand Prix.
I did like the plastic body panels, though. You just don’t see many terrible looking old Saturns, unless they’ve been crashed.
Hmmm. Curious, because what I recall was the original Saturn engine, with that metal timing chain, came to be seen as more durable and easier to maintain than Japanese engines requiring attention to timing belt change intervals, but the tradeoff was an agricultural level of noise.
Welp, all I can tell you is I went to school with a girl that got a brand-new SL1 with the 8-valve base engine in it threw the chain, and I know of one other one, same engine same generation that did the same thing.
And frankly, I’d rather have the quietness of a belt along with the added maintenance over the reduced maintenance of a noisy chain.
Some engines with chains are more or less silent, some aren’t, but virtually all are a PITA to change the chain on. I would LOVE to change the chain on my Lincoln because it is bound to have slop in it after 20+ years, but my god what a time eater, and if I’m going to spend that much time with the engine in the car I’d do just about as well to have a long block sitting there and swap that in instead.
As long as the car is designed for the belt to be easily serviced, such as a Camry 2.2 engine, or many old K-Cars, I’d take the belt design every time. OTOH, if they are designed by sadomasochistic assholes at VW on cars such as a Passat 2.8 or New Beetles, give me a chain. (But not a VW chain because they can’t do that right either.)
/still-scarred ex VW tech
To each his own, but the reality is that very generally speaking, timing belts have a life of about 60k miles, and timing chains have a life of about 250k miles. To the average consumer who views his/her automobile as simply another appliance, the 60k belt change means a $1000 trip to a dealership (usually because it includes a water pump as well). To that same average consumer, a timing chain will never have to be changed during the life that he/she owns the vehicle.
I much prefer a chain. I remember when car companies started advertising the fact that it was a chain over a belt. A chain stretched. A belt broke and blew the engine.
Today a timing belt replacement can indeed be a $1000 job. Again, blame FWD. Replacing the timing belt on my Pinto was a 20 minute job, and I run it with the cover removed so I can keep an eye on it. I have replaced the timing belts on many RWD cars, and rarely was it a difficult or time consuming job.
Timing chains, however, are a different matter. On older cars (1970s and back, as well as some newer ones) a timing chain lasted only about 60,000 miles before it stretched enough to throw the timing off. And once it started stretching, it wore even faster. To make matters worse, manufacturers often foolishly used plastic sprockets on the cam. I destroyed one engine when the teeth all sheared off the cam sprocket. That was back in the mid ’70s. Ever since then, I have replaced timing chains at around 60,000 miles, and always replaced the cam sprocket with a steel one. The timing chain on a small block Chevy is extremely easy to replace.
The last small block Chevy engine I built, for a combination street rod/drag racer, I decided not to use a chain at all, and used a gear drive conversion kit from Summit Racing, I have been very pleased with it. I chose the straight cut gears, for strength, but also for the cool gear whine. Sounds almost like a blower.
I had seriously considered a PT Cruiser, till I found out about the $1000 belt change. $1000 every 60,000 miles? That’s once every 2 years for me. No thanks.
On most engines, both car and motorcycle, that use chain driven cams, when the chain is never replaced, I have found that over half the time, catastrophic engine failure is caused by chain and/or sprocket failure.
My 221,000 mile Malbu continues to run fine. I’m assuming it still has it’s original chain. Using a stethoscope, I cannot find and chain noise. I’m not going to replace the chain because for one, I’m very bored with this car and want something else, but won’t give it up until it blows up, and 2, at that kind of mileage, there is likely to be significant wear in a lot of other places as well.
I just today got my Citroen diesel going after a belt change I had the injector pump out to swap it for a bosch unit however it wouldnt work so that slowed the job down but the belt was fine but the waterpump had corrosion below the bearing so it was probably leaking cambelt and rollers $107 NZ and genuine waterpump $85 just the belt job takes maybe four hours with my tools less with air wrenches and the correct equipment, Ive done around 130,000 kms since I bought the car and the belt wasnt new when I got it so I prefer belts more accurate last well easy and cheap to replace.
GM would sell a lot more cars if they would embrace the no-haggle model across their entire line-up. Some people, myself included, absolutely hate haggling. Buying something should not be a confrontation between two parties hostile to each other. And make no mistake, a car haggler is hostile. They go into the transaction with pre-conceived notions of what will happen gleaned from lots of research about the process and what they can expect to pay, and inevitably the salesman does not disappoint, trying to upsell the customer and get them into deals more beneficial to them.
A car should have the actual price on the sticker in the window. Period. Take it or leave it. That was what Saturn brought to the table, and until their line-up got stale it worked like a charm. It’s a shame that I was never in the market for a new car, because that would be my first stop. As it is, I refuse to talk to a salesman. If there is no price in the window or it says “ask for price”, I’m not interested. A car is a TV is a loaf of bread, and the price should be accurately reflected.
As for the subject of the article, my sister had one of those and it was a competent little car. I was never unhappy to be driving it or riding in it. It needed a clutch replacement after about 8 years, mostly due to my sister’s abysmal driving ability, but the car lasted for 14 years. When it died she shopped a new Saturn.
It’s too bad that GM went the way they did with Saturn, but you can’t teach a bloated hierarchy new tricks, and as you said above it was destined for failure. GM was probably the last company on Earth that should have tried this.
The problem is that, in the age of the internet, it’s quite easy to get the necessary information on the real out-the-door price, available incentives and trade-in values, so many customers do not mind haggling anymore. Saturn’s model was made obsolete by the internet.
As long as people like me exist the no-haggle model will never be obsolete.
Was Saturn’s model made obsolete by the internet, or is the mainstream urinating-contest with the salesman obsolete? What’s the point of salespeople and customers arguing over price when both sides are now armed with the same information?
In Pennsylvania, the dealer chain CarSense has reintroduced this no-haggle model for pre-owned vehicles and has been extraordinarily successful with it.
Every car is no haggle, the manufacturer prints a nice little sticker they put right on the window, you just pay that and boom, no haggle.
I am as nutty about cars as anyone here so when the Saturn came out in 1992, I decided to have a look see. I had been hearing about how wonderful the thing was and I wanted to find out myself.
At the time I was driving a 1989 Accord LX four door, five speed, which is one of the best cars I have ever driven. So the old boot and I tool into the local Saturn store and we are met by the sales troll, a guy with sideburns and a beer belly. Looks like a total GM type and he says to me, and I shit you not, “Ready to be freed from Japanese cars?” I asked him if he had ever driven a Honda and he proudly replied, “Nope, and I never will!”
OK so we get some keys and go out to an SL2 five speed, with a/c, roughly the same car as my Accord. Except it was $2000 more the Honda. When I asked why this was the case, he replied, “Cuz it’s worth it!” I try to start the car and the battery is flat. OK thinks I, it is just off the transporter. We get the jump cart and geter goin’ and off we go. I then noticed that it was rough, noisy and crude in every manner. It crashed into bumps and didn’t steer straight.
I returned to the dealership and said, “GM spent eight billion on this?” We laughed and left and at that moment I knew GM was a lost cause. There is no way a car that bad should ever have been released on the public.
I had a couple of Saturns and generally liked them as basic transportation, but if anyone ever tried to tell me that they were supposed to compete with the Accord, I’d have walked out without even test-driving. The SL2 wasn’t even in the same neighborhood as the Accord.
“and we are met by the sales troll, a guy with sideburns and a beer belly”
That got a chuckle! Your description is a world of difference from the khaki clad, polo shirted, chipper twentysomethings they depicted in all the adverts.
I remember one ad where they even had a Saturn
actorowner that was so happy with the car and buying experience that they got a job at the dealership!Our dealer, er, retailer rep was actually a chipper guy in a polo shirt and khakis. I actually liked the guy. Not sure what happened to him after Saturn’s plug was pulled; probably went to the Audi/Porsche/SAAB/etc store next door (the larger dealer group owned both, and a few others in town, including the local Buick, Honda and Acura franchises).
My friend Erin in Milwaukee sold Saturns in 2006-2008. He loved it. He was only 22–now he’s a social worker.
Interesting. I have driven a Honda Accord. It is a perfectly adequate transportation appliance, though not one I would want to own, if for no other reason than the Honda name. The Honda name on a car has always had a negative connotation to me.
I have put 125,000 miles on a 2001 Chevy Malibu. Just like the Accord, it is a perfectly competent transportation appliance. The problem is, just like the Accord, that’s ALL it is. But I have had very few issues with it during all those miles. It starts, runs, and drives just fine. It is very smooth and comfortable. It goes where you point it, and I have drive 24 hours straight in it on the interstates many times. Like sitting in your living room. I don’t like the isolated feel, no feedback from the brakes or wheel. But I would say it pretty much matches the Accord in every way. And GM made it.
The scary thing is just how little GM knows about the business they’re in. They thought they were headed towards EPA figures over 50% higher than they could achieve? They told people that they were going to achieve those fantasy figures? The spent 8 billion dollars on a car launch that could never recover their investment before it would be completely obsoleted by its competition even if it had been as good as they hoped? They benchmarked a moving target and took two model cycles to get to where it had been?
This stuff looks even worse if you read about how the Cavalier and its J-mates were supposed to drive the Honda Accord back into the sea in Brock Yates’ “The Decline and Fall of the US Auto Industry.” If you followed the gestation of the Volt and saw that GM still makes unfounded public statements before devlivering a disappointing product that costs billions, you might be bitter that they’re still around.
Granted when Saturn was intially born it was supposed to be a sub-J body car, the first Saturn prototypes, the cars they showed to the press and even had a special on Donahue with Roger Smith, were about the size of a Geo Metro sedan more or less, they were really small and engine size was supposed to be around 1.0 litre, so that where those MPG figures came from, remember that was 1983, when everyone was predicting 2.00 plus a gallon gas by 1990.
Looking at the Saturn shown in 1984, it seems to be just as big as the production car. The primary change seems to be in the short overhangs, which are exactly the sort of design feature GM concepts routinely use to attract interest but that GM utterly fails to translate to production. Other examples would be the RWD proportions of the Volt concept, the completely integrated and minimal bumpers of GM concepts during the ’80s, and the ridiculously large wheels of the concepts of the past 15 years.
Theres a picture from the side that shows how small it is, originally the base price was going to be $5,000 to, and it ended up being $7995, things change.
I understand inflation and even market changes during the incredibly long gestation period of the Saturns. Still, the volume competitors were already cars closer in size to the production Saturn than to the Metro.
I was searching for some early Saturn documentation, and I found this from September of 1990:
“How significant will it(Saturn) be? That depends on the execution of the product and the public response to it. The key is that consumers now have the perception of Japanese cars having quality. Yet that quality lead over the domestics has dissipated or disappeared, to the point Lee Iacocca goes on TV crying, `Come back to us; our quality is better,` “ Brady said.
“The consumer buys what was, not what is, and relies on experience over the last five years to make a buying decision,“ Brady said.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-09-30/business/9003210542_1_import-fighter-saturn-beleaguered-automaker/2
The more things change… I’m only old enough to remember the same boasts from the introduction of the American FWD compacts around 1978-1981. I’m sure the auto enthusiasts a generation older than me can remember the same promises accompanying the Vega and Pinto, except that time the US manufacturers were merely shooting for European levels of dependability and durability. Now we’re here again, with a US industry that wants everyone to make believe they were born yesterday.
I imagine that long gestation time of Saturn was also due to the “too many cooks” aproach, every component and marketing guy at GM was adding input at one point or another and then the car was “clinic-ed” with test audiences too
These were 3 early Saturn styling studies, with….a min-van included!
I want to know where that image came from…
So a baby-Aurora, an Isuzu Stylus, and a Plymouth Colt Vista were Saturn’s biggest aspirations?
FYI, i really loved the L-Series..regardless of how much it was based off Opel products as a successor to the Cadilliac Catera.
At the very least, grammer check!
Ummm…grammar check! You just put your foot in it…
Owned a lot of Saturns and liked them very well. The final results were very disappointing. I certainly knew of no timing chain problems with the early SL’s. They ate the miles and the mileage that my wife and I got (both old folks that have no lead feet) were in the 40’s on the hiway and 30’s around town.
Then they came out with the vue and the adjacent article on the last days is exactly on target. I actually do not remember problems with the S series or the L series. Service was good. Product was good.
Now I bow to the expertise of those of you who knew this was going to happen. I certainly did not predict it. Not being totally stupid, however, I sure saw it happening. My 2002 vue was my worst new car buying experience. I am driving a Nissan again and do not intend to blow any more new car money on government motors.
The twin cam engine was the one that ate oil. But on my ’93, I had a bit of trouble with brakes warping, the alternator went at 80k, and the car started nickel and diming me at around 130k. Of course, I’m an N of one.
My brother-in-law bought an SL1 when they first came out. He was a foreign car guy but got hooked by the hype. After a few years and a couple clutches, that may very well have been his fault, he went back to foreign cars and hasn’t looked back. Other than the plastic being good in the rust belt, I didn’t see the pull of these cars. But even if they impressed me, I’d of never had one as I love to haggle at a car dealer and won’t go to one where I can’t. GM’s hubris in thinking that the real problem was the customer and not the cars both amazed and depressed me as I wanted them to succeed in the import battle.
And Bryce, I’d love to hear what you have to say about cars. I can talk to anyone about politics but it’s only at this site that I find such a common love for and depth of knowledge of, much deeper than mine, cars and trucks.
“GM’s hubris in thinking that the real problem was the customer and not the cars…”
Dude just won the comment section!
Man, you just nailed it. I just ended a little over 4 years with a company that doesn’t understand this any better than GM ever did. It’s sad, really.
I wonder what the commentary would be if we had been around back in the 1930’s with the demise of the first ‘companion brands’.
Man, that Oakland I had was a POS, but the Viking? Great car…
When discussing Saturn, I often think of the opening title of the TV show “All in the Family” where song goes “Gee our old LaSalle ran great”…
Me, being a Pontiac fan, and a former Olds fan, have no love lost for Saturn. I explained all that in the other posting on this subject.
However, there is a Saturn I like. Actually two.
When the Sky Turbo came out a few years ago, I managed to finagle a ride in one. It was a blast! I still want one. Although, I’d rather take the Solstice, I like the looks of that one better than the Sky/Speedster/whatever the Korean variant was called.
Secondly, my daughter recently totalled her Pontiac. She replaced it with a Saturn Aura XR, which was their top of the line model. I have a Pontiac G6 and have owned an Epsilon based Malibu, too, but this car blows both of them out of the water. Fast, quiet, good fuel mileage, all the stuff I would like in MY car…
I hope that the DNA from the top of the line Saturn got transferred to the Buick or Chevy Epsilon II cars. It would be a shame if it didn’t.
“I wonder what the commentary would be if we had been around back in the 1930′s with the demise of the first ‘companion brands’.”
Ha! “What a piece of junk, that’s the last Moon I’ll ever buy, I’m buying a Stanley Steamer, next!”
They should have kept Marquette, they really had something good there!
I bought a brand new 1995 SL base stick for $13K. Nice basic styling, nice shifter but at 29k miles it consumed a quart of oil every 600 miles. And then the brake rotors kept needing to be shaved. Dealership never solved the oil problem. I think it was endemic to most Saturn owners, and the line from the dealership is that it was normal. Anybody else care to comment? I traded it in for a new 1999 New Beetle and encountered a whole new set of quality problems.
I bought a ’99 SL1 in 2004 that had 60,000 miles on it. I had it 5 years, putting another 110,000 on it, spent less than $200 in repairs. Biggest cost was the radiator fan. Most reliable car I ever owned, but I was starting to worry. On the way home from work one day, I had been considering trading it, and made a firm decision to keep it. Five minutes later it was totaled. Probably just as well, as the new clutch it was going to need in a few months would have cost more than the car was worth. But I got 33 mpg in the summer and 36 in the winter (no a/c makes a difference when you only have 100 hp), and the HHR I replaced it with only gets a disappointing 28 mpg. The Saturn was light… 2350 lbs for a sedan! In spite of its humble suspension, it was actually fun to drive because of the light weight. When I bought it, I wanted something economical, and hoped sincerely that I wouldn’t hate it. (I had one kid in college and another in high school, and life was very expensive at the time, thus the choice of automobile. Used Hondas were (and are) expensive to buy.) As it turned out, I came to almost love the thing, and it is probably the best financial decision I’ve ever made.
But the last Saturns weren’t Saturns, so I don’t really regret the shuttering of the company. I wouldn’t mind having a Sky, though! And a year into the HHR, I don’t really like the thing.
My dad had a late ’90’s SL that he bought used after putting his mid-90’s Camry into a ditch. He was quite happy with it, and got several years of nearly problem-free driving out of it. I drove it a few times and while I’d never buy one myself, it wasn’t a bad car. My sister and her husband cleaned it out after he died a few years ago and offered it to me. I said no. We don’t really need a car where we live, and it’s easier for us to rent one when we need it.
I liked my ’91 Saturn, it served us well and had a thoughtfully designed interior. Lost in all the criticism is the huge price difference between an SL1 with option package B and a similarly equipped Japanese anything. Honda didn’t even include a passenger side mirror, that was 130 more dollars.
The plastic door panels were a great idea, who cared if they had large panel gaps. They didn’t collect door dings or rust.
I got close to 40 MPG from mine, and I was quite happy with it.
When I sold it 3 years later to move overseas, I got 72% of my purchase price for it, and had so many calls I asked the paper to pull the ad.
But go ahead and bash the Saturn experiment, at least they tried.
As usual people amplify the faults with one car and exemplify the advantages of another without really looking at the big picture. The Honda Civic had a lot of road noise, no steering feel, an incredibly complicated engine bay, and no tachometer, radio, floor mats, hubcaps, and many other features. De-contenting by Honda and hype by dealers with copies of consumer reports convinced buyers to pay too much for too little car. Toyota was selling on it’s name while across town the Geo Prism was panned when it was the same car. Nissan’s Sentra was a strong runner which also suffered from de-content and required much more cash to equip.
Well, my father had a ’93 SL2 with the sawtooth wheels like the one photographed. I remember it was $13,000 new. Our impression was that it was a nice little car with lots of nice features for a decent price. Antilock brakes with traction control were standard, which was unusual at that point in time on a small economical car; it was also quite useful to have those things when driving on snowy roads in the winter. It had a fold down rear seat, air bags, an inside trunk release, alloy wheels, 4 wheel disc brakes, air conditioning, 4 speed automatic trans, AM/FM with tape player, adjustable lumbar support, child locks on the doors, good gas mileage (28 in town, 36 on the highway with an automatic) LOTS of power. My mother used to call it “the little rocket”, it had the DOHC engine in it. It had this cool “Norm/Perf” switch you could use to change at what point the transmission shifted. We thought it was a really good value for the purchase price. We never had any major problems with it. By the time we got rid of it in 2010, it had 180,000 miles on it. The body panels were plastic but the paint still looked nice and shiny. I didn’t think the interior was cheap at all. I thought the car handled really quite well. You mentioned the Corolla interior was “better”. Well I have a friend who still has a 98 Corolla and I certainly don’t think it is better than the interior on the Saturn was, the Corolla’s seems cheaper and more monotone to me.
I do think that GM did not know how to market the Saturn brand once it had been around for a few years. They turned it into just another GM brand. THAT I think was the real mistake. But the Saturn S series, the car itself, was definitely not a bad car at all. I don’t see how you could knock the car itself unless you didn’t actually own one. Was a Corolla or a Civic really so much better? The Saturn engine was a little loud under load, and the Japanese cars were certainly good cars, but the Saturn S series gave them a legitimate run for the money. The Saturn and Corolla were head to head competitors. I seem to remember Consumer Reports rating them as equal around 1993, but then giving the Corolla the top rating by virtue of Toyota’s overall consistent good ratings at the time. Also the market shifted away from small cars and towards SUVs in the late 90s, when we had 90 cent a gallon gasoline.
You shred this derivative yet innocuous thing and give the original but hideous Ion a pass? That car is the real sin and the biggest reason Saturn is no longer with us.
You obviously missed the whole point; try reading it again. Or here’s the thumbnail: The Saturn SL wasn’t a bad car, but starting up Saturn was a really bad idea. GM lost many billions on Saturn. Which means this car is the agent of a major Deadly Sin, even if it’s not a deadly car.
If the SL line was simply the new 1991 J car, GM would have been better off.
To start a brand that had sales staff looking down at GM, and then years later say “never mind” was one of many “deadly sins”.
I own two SL-2’s –a ’96 (192k miles) and a ’01 w/103k both are 5 spds.
Quick if pushed (shift @ 6500 redline ) and 38-44mpg trips cruised under 75. The’01 must have slightly taller gears per tach– 2900 rpm at 70 vs 3200 for ’96 hence mpg difference?
Replaced starter recently on ’96 plus radiator and serpentine tensioner otherwise nothing. Both handle 28 miles gravel rt to town– stiff suspension slides over washboard better than wife’s newer Focus or neighbors’ various SUV’s. Unusual for vintage independent RS corners flat even rough roads. Steel chain cam drive also a quality touch unusual back then and i like the tough polymer body panels.
Looking for another ’96-’02 (best years and design before returned to GM culture?). Some for-sale ads owner doesn’t even know single cam or twin i just tell them look at speedometer 130 mph vs 110 and red-line 6500 rpm vs 5500!
I had two Saturns. The first was a ’92 SL1 with an automatic transmission in deference to my first wife. I thought the car had some character with the crazy automatic belts and whiney transmission. It was my second new car and in comparison to its predecessor, a gutless and rather crude Ford Tempo, it felt like quite a step-up. It handled well enough but developed quite a few problems:
1) the front turn signal bulbs blew constantly due moisture exposure. I used to see Saturns with one bulb out all the time and I had to carry spares. GM/Saturn couldn’t fix it;
2) It had several collapsed engine mounts which caused it to vibrate even more than usual. No permanent fix or even explanation why from GM/Saturn who replaced at least 3 of the bloody things;
3) It lost an alternator within 3 years;
4) the windshield cracked in the car wash;
5) the factory rubber [Dunlops?] were TERRIBLE in wet weather driving, giving the car an un-nerving airborne quality at highway speeds. I eventually put a set of Michelins on it which added considerably to the road noise but transformed the wet weather handling for the better;
6) it started to rust out on the B-Pillars – one of the non-plastic bits;
7) the gearbox was refusing to shift into reverse much of the time by the time I got rid of it – requiring you to jockey the car in and out of gears so you could “get” reverse.
Nevertheless, I traded it on a ’95 SL2 which was smoother, and a bit plusher, and with the exception of a persistant fuel pump problem [eventually fixed], more reliable.
When I got rid of that one in ’99, I test drove the new Saturn. By then the marque had lost what little character the original car had and it felt like a GM generic bland-mobile. I got a Subaru Legacy instead.
I have a couple of experiences with these cars. First, in 1991 I was a year out of HS & working at a car wash/detail center, not long after the 1st-gen Saturns went on sale. Within a few weeks I managed to get myself off the line & into a detailer position which paid more & was a little more ‘glamourous’ than being a grunt on the line. During my stint on the line, I got seat time in tens of dozens of different cars. I too was a bit disappointed in the quality of materials that went into the interiors. This was around the time Honda had their 3rd gen or so Accord out. The interior in those Hondas was NICE! I recall remarking to myself, ‘why can’t GM make an interior this nice?’ Also, that wash facility had an inflatable drying apparatus called ‘The Stripper.’ Great name, right? Anyway, every time a Saturn came down the line, we had to hold the Stripper’s bags off the Saturn body because it was marring those cheapo plastic body panels. Simply pitiful.
Fast forward to 1996. The 2nd gen Saturn SL’s were then on sale. I found the new jelly-bean styling of those cars just nauseating; but then again, ALL the car makers were doing that scheme, too. My mom was in need of a new car as her ’88 Quad 4 Skylark was showing what a true POS it really was. She couldn’t qualify for a car loan because she was in the middle of a divorce from the penny-pinching, spineless miser that was my old man. Since I had a good job by then & credit falling out of my backside, I offered to put the Buick in my name & trade it for a new car for her. She actually liked the new Saturn SL in the dark purple (new color that year) & I got one for her. Even though it was much improved over the prior gen, the interior still felt cheap & the engine was still a buzzy, unrefined, vibrating lump. I was driving an ’85 Caddy Eldorado as my daily & a ’77 Monte Carlo was my project, & even both of those oldies seemed vastly more refined & taut than that brand-new Saturn. No wonder people were flocking to Honda, Toyota & Nissan back then! I’m not at all surprised Saturn turned out to be the abysmal failure it did…saw the writing on the wall in 2002. Proof that even with billions at their disposal, nobody can F-up quite like General Mismanagement…er, Motors!
I remember when the Saturn first premiered. At the time, I thought it was an awesome car, an American car to compete with the likes of Toyota, Nissan, etc. As time goes by, however, the car looked more European than American or Japanese. And I no longer found the Saturn to be the car to drive. Which is unfortunate when you consider how desperately American car manufacturers need something new to compete against the Japanese and Europeans.
One of my wife’s cousins purchased an SL when they were still fairly fresh. He was always proud of the “Sport Tuned Suspension” and kept the car for eons. We had an 88 Accord at the time, so the Saturn did not seem to me to be the greatest thing ever, but for folks used to Chevettes and Citations, I could see how Saturn could have been a viable thing.
I understood that a big problem was that Roger Smith retired around 1990, and nobody thereafter really cared about Saturn. Sort of the Edsel fiasco all over, just stretched out longer and without a McNamara figure to kill the whole thing quickly. By 1990, there was nobody at GM with even remotely the management chops of someone like Robert McNamara, so the system just kind of absorbed it and allowed it to become a sort of redundant Oldsmobile.
My friends bought one of the first wagons. They had the motor mount problem and rust around the tailgate frame. The doors rattled when you closed them. I liked the coupe with the hidden headlamps, and changed my mind after my experience with the wagon… Saturn was a “Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing.” When I saw the Relay, I knew it was over. Did the Aura even have the plastic body panels?? The billions poured into Saturn (and SAAB/hummer) could have saved Oldsmobile and Pontiac. Saturn dragged GM down the way the Pacer (tooling) dragged AMC down. I DID lust over the Sky, but what a poor design–hundreds of pounds heavier than a Miata, limited instrumentation (in a Sports Car?) and a top that swallowed the trunk. Marketing Giggle: when I requested a brochure for the Sky, I asked what the “Redline” model was and the girl at 800 Saturn replied, “it has a red top.” LOL!
A client bought a Saturn VUE after a friend who worked for the dealer told her that she could get one with a stick. She came to despise that car, and traded it in about a year or year and a half on a 4 door Jeep Wrangler. She laughted telling me that she has never hated a car so much, and this from a person who was the long term owner of two Yugos.
Interesting aside, I was trying to remember the name of the Vue, and discovered that Saturn.com is still up. 🙂
Amazingly, in November 2016, Saturn.com is STILL up….
http://www.gm.com/owner-assistance/saturn/astra.html
“A ridiculously enjoyable sport compact”? Holy hyperbole, Batman.
Went looking for Saturn and got a 404 instead! 🙂
My sister-in-law bought one of the Saturn vans. I drove it during a visit once. I wish I hadn’t. Worst brakes on any vehicle I’ve ever driven, including old drums on a 72 F100.
For some reason, I have long equated what Saturn was envisioned to be with the place Kia holds in the current market.
Kia, from its US birth, aired ads comparing its Sephia to Civic. Kia sought to be the low-cost Japan fighter. Saturn, albeit with folksy marketing, was essentially trying to do the same thing. Saturn failed, for the reasons mentioned above and others. Kia, conversely, has carved out a very nice niche for itself. Where do the paths diverge?
Saturn put a plant in non-union TN–so has Kia–so its not that. While the Sephia was hopelessly generic, it served its purpose–it provided low-cost reliable transportation. The Saturn had its share of reliability issues and quality issues, Then the fact that GM is GM nailed the coffin shut—lack of new tech/product, badge engineering, and completely diluted marketing messages.
Kia, for its part, has successfully differentiated itself from Hyundai products. Kia products have remained good value for money. It has updated designs and features regularly. It has brought desireable models to market–see SOUL. Kia products have provided owners with acceptable levels of reliability and quality. Kia has provided extra sales support by offering a long standard warranty.
Kia was able to overcome reservations about Korean cars that resulted from Hyundai’s substandard Excel model in the mid 1980’s. Saturn was unable to overcome all the handicaps that being part of GM included. Tragic. Saturn/GM failed because it deserved to, Kia succeeds because it deserves to. –It is quite fair to equate Nissan’s declining market share with Kia’s expanding market share, which proves that Kia has indeed become the low-cost Japan fighter.
I think the difference between Saturn and Hyundai/Kia is that Hyundai and Kia weren’t really trying to compete directly with Toyota and Honda until the last few years. They started out undercutting everyone like crazy and then steadily improved their quality (backed up by the 100,000 mile warranty, which, whether they honor it or not is another thing) to the point where they earned respectability, gained an improved reputation, and could raise their prices accordingly. They may not be quite on par with Honda and Toyota now, but they’re not that far behind either.
During the ’00s, they sold a lot of cheap cars to people who were just looking for a simple, basic, reliable car but couldn’t afford to pay Honda and Toyota prices. My first Hyundai was an ’04 Accent which sold for $8,990 flat–what my parents paid for their Golf BACK IN 1988–and it was a pretty good car. The technology and features lagged behind the Japanese–my ’09 Accent new was probably about as good as an ’00 Civic–but you know what? A 2000 Civic was a pretty good car. And I don’t really need a car to do any more today than I did in 2000.
Driving the ’09 Accent is basically the same as my 1996 Golf. Same features, same green instrument panel lighting, same upright seating, same ride, same three-knob A/C control, same tire size, same everything except for better mileage and airbags (and ABS). But that Golf did whatever I needed it to do for many years, and the Accent does too, and it’s been stone-cold reliable.
The bottom line is, Hyundai and Kia spent many years working to earn respect by getting the basics right. Toyota and Honda had done the same thing many decades before. But it was a long, hard slog. GM never got this. Or they got it and didn’t want to do it. Or most likely, they just weren’t committed enough. Old habits die hard.
Saturn failed because it divorced it self from all of the “handicaps” of being part of GM. They spent way too much developing the car by not using anything from the GM parts bin. No one would have known or cared if it used the basic Delco Remy alternator that was quite reliable but no they needed a Saturn alternator and threw away money on doing that and all of the other Saturn unique just to be unique parts.
Kia on the other hand didn’t spend hardly any money developing the Sephia since it was just a slightly modified licensed copy of the Mazda 323. That meant a much lower profitability point that made them able to make a profit at a low price and volume. Since they were able to make a profit early on they were able to invest in upgrading and expanding their product line.
Because of the high development costs the S series would have had to take over the market and sell at top dollar for it to make a profit. The fact that they drug out the process for so long also meant that by the time the vehicle made it to market it was out of date. The cars they bench-marked it against were two generations removed from what they were up against when it was finally introduced, to add insult they wanted more for the Saturn and their no haggle pricing didn’t help with that issue. Yes the Kia was a generation removed from its competition but some consumers were willing to live with that due to the low price.
R Henry
An interesting comparison between Saturn and Kia,
When car shopping with my younger sister in the late 80’s – early 90’s we test drove a Saturn S1 or 2?
Though she didn’t love the car during the test drive ,she didn’t hate it either. She just found it to be a rather boring noisy vehicle.
She also wasn’t impressed with the “no haggle on price” policy, and thought Saturns expensive for what they were.
One other stop we made that day was the local Hyundai dealer.
Though we didn’t test drive an Excel ,we sat in one in the dealer show room.
My first thought after sitting in it was “third world country vehicle”.
A terribly crude car that was basic and seemed shoddily assembled .
Fast forward to 2015 ,and 3 of my sibling and myself, all of us former GM owners now drive Kia’s .
All of us are satified with them and one sibling is on her 3rd Kia with zero complaints or issues.
Your thought that “Saturn/GM failed because it deserved to, Kia succeeds because it deserves to” in my family’s experiences certainly holds true
Yeah. those “80’s/90’s Hyuandai’s Kia’s were toy cars for sure. (long running toy cars in many cases)
Agree Saturns downfall was keeping basically the same S series car for 10 years, And oil consumption really is a problem on these cars. The early years were great, parts could be gotten overnight and the factory would dealer locate backordered parts if possible so there was rarely a wait for parts. It was around 2004 when I was working at a Nissan/Saturn dealership and it was pretty obvious GM had lost interest and the upcoming models were inferior. I did go to a Saturn meeting where GM purchased a bunch of bicycles we had to assemble, and then the schools brought over a bunch of disadvantaged primary school kids that made little gifts in school for us, and they all went home with new bicycles, that was pretty cool. The woman who hosted the meeting had been with Saturn from the start. One wtf moment was when we had to stand in a circle around a rock and try to think of what this represented. Whatever it was I have don’t recall what the significance was supposed to be. I did buy a family member a 95 SL2 twin cam stick shift for $1000 dollars in 2004, it had about 117k miles on it. We finally sent it to the junkyard at 267k miles, it was starting to smoke too much by then. Engine, trans, clutch, shocks, radiator, heater core, suspension bits and steering rack were all still original when junked. Got hit in the door/fender area and insurance totaled it and paid out $1250 dollars and let her keep the car. A fender, door skin and outside mirror from U pull and she was good to go. Needed 2 O ring for an AC line and ps pump seal along with a couple of coolant sensors when we first got it, a tech at work replaced those for me as a favor. AC still was ice cold the day it was junked. In 150K miles it needed top motor mount, water pump and belt, starter, battery, alternator, brake switch, clutch switch, coils, plug wires, rocker cover gasket, front pads and rotors, shifter cables (U pull), and clutch master/slave assembly. And easy to work on and parts were cheap. Never stranded us, although I had to wire up the shift cable end as a temp fix while on the road once.
Almost forgot also replaced engine fan motor and heater blower motor. Got around 40 mpg hwy, low 30’s around town.
Bought for a family member (same one who had the Saturn) a ’95 Prism with 200k miles about 8 months ago. 1.6 3 speed auto, still ice cold AC and PS. $750.00. Non interference T belt motor, that’s a plus.
Uses no oil, needed to replace it’s cheap troublesome aftermarket distributor, found genuine Toyota replacement at U pull for $40.00.
The build quality is far superior. Paint and interior on this 22 years old car is in much better condition than the ’95 SL was when junked in 2009. This NUMMI car would have been by far the better new car choice in ’95.
The SL2 did handle better though, and it’s twin cam engine with 5 speed had quite a bit more zip.
Time will tell how it holds up, but it’s driven little (203k miles now), so should be good to go for a long time.
“Relentless refinement” – a great phrase you used in regards to the Japanese in those days. And sadly one that was foreign to GM. They dump a car on the market and do no continuous improvement to eliminate the niggling annoyances and flaws.
Paul’s eulogy hits all the marks quite well. The entire Saturn deal was the wrong way to fix issues at GM – the new plant and distribution channel were a distraction to building a decent car. And, it was essentially a statement by GM that their other Divisions were screwed up. Nothing like taking 5% of your company and spending billions beating up the remaining 95% with it. Does anyone recall the ad campaign where Scion implies Toyota and Lexus are screwed up? I don’t either! (But, Toyota came a bit too close, what is it about being number 1 that makes these things happen?)
Saturn was, in a word, Stupid.
Paul’s comment on the eventual ADD of the original mission statement is accurate, but realistically Saturn had to expand to survive. Saturn had a little initial excitement like the Hyundai Excel in the mid ’80s and the Kia Sephia in the early ’90s. Both of these now successful brands used cheap small cars to build a rounded out full line of cars.
A good point was recently made by a commenter on CC: Few people are excited about a long term relationship with Bottom Feeder Motors. Brands that sell only budget minded cars don’t last – Daewoo, Suzuki, Isuzu, almost dead Mitsubishi all come to mind. Saturn was truly doomed from the start and contributed to GM’s near death experience.
Truly a Deadly Sin.
It was the equivalent of Brady Bunch bringing in cousin Ralph. You had 6 kids to write stories about, but somehow they thought they needed a 7th new kid.
GM had six divisions and suddenly created a 7th. And like Brady Bunch, soon many of those kids were in the unemployment line.
The Saturns were quite a big deal in the early 1990s, and they even had quite a cachet in NE Ohio where I grew up. Several upwardly mobile folks I knew bought them as their second car. For a time, it was a go-to vehicle for the legions of well-educated, middle and upper-middle class folks about to turn away from the Big-3 (back when most people still drove domestic vehicles). There were people I knew that had pretty much sworn off GM, but Saturn was different in their minds. It was really quite brilliant how the Saturn division marketed and sold the vehicles, at least initially, though I totally agree that this was unsustainable. And though the idea of paying sticker price for ANY compact sedan (especially an average one) is ridiculous to me now, think about how high-pressure many (most?) dealerships still were in the early 1990s. I personally love the act of negotiating and playing hardball when buying a car, but there are so, SO many more people who absolutely cannot stand that. For them, a pricing model like Saturn’s, combined with really nice customer service, held a huge amount of appeal.
The fact that Saturn waited until 1996 for a substantial refresh (and really, this was only skin deep) was a very poor decision for GM. And the fact that refinement really wasn’t fixed–ever–was another black eye. Even in 1991, the both 1.9s (single and dual cam) were heavily criticized for engine noise. Sure, they made incremental improvements over the years, but NVH still never was competitive with the best, or even with the middle of the pack.
Still, at least the early Saturns made a huge impact on culture in my neck of the woods, and I have many great memories of these cars. My two best friends in high school both had SL2s, and they were a relatively desirable car in my eyes back then. Another friend had an SC2 a bit later, which was downright cool. To reach 0-60 in a little over 8 seconds (with the manual) and still get mileage in the low 30s was pretty darn appealing to young drivers like myself.
Paul’s article and the comments really hit the nail on the head in many ways. In particular, the planning of what to do next (as in the mid ’90s) seems half-baked at best! By 2002-2003, Saturn wasn’t really considered anymore. The SL2 had been uncompetitive for 4-5 years–arguably longer–and the Ion that replaced it was–to put it very kindly–not worth the wait. I believe Car and Driver noted in their road test that it was the most disappointing all-new vehicle (domestic or overall, not sure) in a decade.
Too bad. Hindsight is always 20/20 but, even 20+ years ago, there was a lot about Saturn that was unsustainable.
Here in Northern California, Saturns were one of the few domestic cars with any sort of presence on the roads. GM and Hal Riney really did score with a demographic who had otherwise abandoned american cars, and there was a real opportunity to win back customers had Saturn been properly developed.
(The Saturn ad campaign was so good, a left-wing grad student believed his car was built by a “worker-owned cooperative”, causing me to do a bit of a spit-take.)
However GM could only conceptualize the import competition as a “small (cheap) car problem”. While they spent years launching Saturn, Toyota was planning a full-scale assault on GM’s midsized strongholds with the 1992 Camry and the Lexus brand, and responses were too little and too late.
I don’t know if Saturn was really “unsustainable”, but it would have required an All-In strategy that would have completely disrupted GM’s brand structure. But then again, if GM was organizationally capable, it wouldn’t have needed Saturn in the first place.
Yeah, I guess I meant “unsustainable” based on the path it was already on (not updating cars regularly, not expanding the model lineup, etc.) I completely agree that a more “all-in” strategy could have made Saturn viable, but of course to the accelerated detriment of existing brands, particularly Oldsmobile and Pontiac.
What really made Saturn special was the customer experience, and that experience probably is what sold the cars more than the cars themselves. If they could have found a middle ground between the (often) horrible customer experience of other GM brands and the excellent experience of Saturn, the SL could have definitely been a Chevy, as previously suggested, or something else, and the new brand draining marketing and product development dollars would have been unnecessary. But GM of the 1980s trying to fundamentally change how they do business, treat customers, develop cars, etc. just wouldn’t and couldn’t happen. Imagine trying to get a typical1980s Chevy dealership to adopt even a fraction of the practices Saturn employed!
Unfortunately, the hard truth was GM was hemorrhaging sales/losing market share because of all of the debacles of the 1980s (think the X cars, for example), and the “GM” affiliation, for many people even in NE Ohio (where GM was very popular) was toxic. Saturn branding itself as different in every way was brilliant for awhile…until it no longer was that different (at least in terms of product).
Saturn was even mistaken as ‘import’ by many ‘know it alls’. Local boneyard had Saturns in the ‘import’ section, and some dealers had them under ‘used imports’.
Looks to have Escort DNA lol.
To me it looks very ’80s GM, almost like a smaller thirdgen Seville with more tasteful detailing.
To me the front reminds me of a escort, IMO it looks like a GM version of the escort.
To me INMHO, this Saturn Prototype Sedan looked like a shrunken version of the much larger 1986-91 GM FWD H-Body 4 Door Sedans aka the Pontiac Bonneville, Oldsmobile Delta Eighty Eight & Buick Le Sabre.
This prototype reminds me a lot of the Chevrolet Corsica, a combination of this styling prototype (taken from autosofinterest . com) and the production Corsica. This car’s blunt nose, and the production cars midsection.
I see a lot of J-car there. What really was the point?
Wow, they could’ve put that Saturn prototype in production as a Chevy in 1985 and it would’ve had a full run before Saturn actually hit the market.
Nobody could spend world-record money to get meh product quite like Roger Smith’s GM.
I remember when these came out. The sedan/wagon were completely off my radar but the SC2 coupes were sharp looking cars. I remember thinking they reminded me a lot of the Geo Storm but sleeker and without the wonky window treatments and chunky proportions. Its too bad the SC2 didn’t get a worked up version of the Quad 4….would’ve made for a little hotrod.
An ex g/f had a 5spd SL1….total slug with no power whatsoever, but it seemed tightly built and was easy on gas.
As a loaner I had a L series sedan for a few weeks…it was a purple 4 cyl/slushbox and what moning groaning rattletrap that pile was. I popped the hood just to make sure it wasn’t a 6 pak of AA batteries supplying the power. Of course when the hit-n-run crinkled fender on my GT Cruiser was finished and I turned in the Sat-Turd, it was all too obvious what a rocket ship that PT was.
While I having trouble putting my head far enough up my fourth point of contact to think like a GM exec, I think one of the reasons why the early Saturns looked like Oldsmobiles was because Saturn buyers were expected to “step up” to an Oldsmobile when they outgrew their Saturn. Obviously this didn’t happen and the overlords grudgingly allowed Saturn to reskin the Opel Calibra to make the L series.
I’ve owned a Saturn for years but I consider it a good appliance and cockroach candidate rather than a fun car.
For being such a failure I sure see a bunch of Saturns in the Portland, OR area, but most are S-series sedans. In Central New York Saturns are even more rare so even they are affected by road salt among other factors. I assume Saturns are more common in areas without emissions testing since their oil burning tendencies must make it hard to pass.
First of all, I am no fan of old Rodger BS. I developed an intense dislike for him when he canceled the Pontiac Fiero. At the time I owned one, that I had bought brand new.
But the original Saturn, while not being outstanding in any way, still appealed to me. Not because of it’s looks, but because of it’s construction. It used the same construction design as the Fiero, a welded steel space frame with bolt on plastic body panels. GM also used this same design on the 1989-1996 Lumina and Pontiac TranSport APV vans. It seemed like such an innovative concept to me, and it seemed to work fine. I still don’t understand why GM abandoned it, and why no one else has ever used it.
The only Saturn that I ever really liked the looks of was the Sky roadster, and I saw that as basically just a knockoff of the Pontiac Solstice. I think that car had a future, and should have continued in the lineup, even if it had to be as a Chevy. I see it as basically the same as the Fiero. A really great car that was never given a chance.
Agreed that the plastic body panels makes a lot of sense, particularly in the rust belt. The reason I’ve heard for this idea not catching on, though, is that body panel gaps can’t be as uniform or unnoticeable with plastic, and today’s customer demands impeccable fit and finish.
Can’t say I ever noticed or would really care at all, but I’m far from a typical customer.
My Fiero had nearly perfect body panel fit. So did the early Saturns. The worst example I ever saw of this type of construction was the Saturn ION. It was cheap and flimsy, it looked and felt like a kit car. Body panel fitment was awful. But the overall concept was good.
For anyone interested in this type of construction, read the book “Fiero” by Gary Witzenburg. It details the development of this type of construction from the very beginning to the finished product. The plastic panels over a steel space frame is actually a more precise and accurate way of building a car that the traditional method. Everything fits perfectly the first time. There are no shims, there is no back room where big muscular guys use big hammers and pieces of wood to bend body panels into alignment. Any body panel from one car will fit perfectly on any other car of the same model, without any alignment issues.
Unfortunately, this did’t help much in the rust belt. The bottom of these cars were still steel, and salt could still get in between the steel body structure and plastic panels and rust out the steel. Other than eliminating metal altogether, I don’t see any way to prevent rust in places where they use salt on the roads.
Don’t mistake this type of construction as being the same as how a Corvette or a Smart car are built. Other than using plastic body panels, the overall design is completely different. And other than GM, I cannot find any reference to anyone else using this technique. It would have had to have been recent, as the technology necessary to use it was very new at the time. The space frame was built completely by robots, measurements were done with lasers.
I agree that Saturn was not an exceptional car by any means, other than it’s unusual construction in the beginning. It was not a bad car, just another average car that had to compete with offerings from all of GM’s other divisions. GM had to many divisions, and too many duplicate cars already. Their sales model was also flawed. It may have sounded like a good idea, but it violated human nature. GM should have realized that maintaining a relationship with their workers in the beginning was not possible over the long term. It was bound to fail.
I have now noticed that Scion is using the same sales techniques as Saturn. One price, no haggling. I’m not going to be buying a new car, but I wonder just how far that goes. They say that the price you see on their website is the price you pay. Sounds simple enough, and almost everything but motor vehicles are sold this way. But when you actually go in, are they going to try and coerce you into buying thousands of $$$ worth of worthless overpriced crap, like extended warranties, paint sealer, upholstery protectant, floor mats, mud guards, window tinting, and on and on?
I agree. My Fiero had great workmanship. I also had 2 4th gen Firebirds with this construction. They were tight and quiet. But, again, my friend’s Saturn wagon was squeaky and the doors were flimsy. Maybe the wagon was an afterthought, and not well-engineered?
When the flash comes, and after, when all that’s left is zombies and roaches, for hundreds of years, the gleam of dent free Saturn body panels will be the only vestige of the glory days before….The End….sad to think Mr. Smith could not have planned that one…
While these were never sold here in Oz, I followed the whole Saturn thing from day one. Even when it was launched I couldn’t quite see the point of it- why not spend the money on fixing existing divisions and dealerships?
Then it took eight years and five billion dollars to get on sale, while core product like the J cars and A bodies were allowed to stagnate, and Cadillac launched too many under engineered models.
How much did this just-good-enough-for-a-while car end up damaging the finances of the rest of GM?
Once it was clear that Saturn would not accomplish it’s mission of vanquishing the Japanese competitors, Pontiac became it’s target! This Kamikaze mission was a success.
My wife bought a 95 Saturn sl1 new before I knew her. That no haggle sales experince having a lot to do with that decision. That car is still going strong at 227,000 miles. It only suffered one major failure in all that time, a trans seal leaking on the clutch. I just changed the factory water pump and all else but for regular maintenance items is as delivered and all works fine. This is in my experience almost unheard of for a GM product. All this said, I still much prefer the feel and driving experience of my cheap rust bucket 92 Civic Lx work car. That must mean something.
I forgot to mention our newer vehicle is a Pilot. Before anyone starts bashing me for GM bashing because of my comment on other period GM products, I do have to admit my brother in law has a couple of Bonnevilles that are near 300,000 miles with a little help
Saturn SL should have been J car replacement, period, for only Chevy/Pontiac.
All the touchy-feely dealer stuff is out the window now, since buyers just look up ‘best prices’ on internet, and pick the rock bottom price.
“If GM had stuck to their original plan of selling the Saturn as an entry level Japanese-fighter at Chevy dealers”… then it would have been Geo, which didn’t really work out either.
In a discussion with a non-car person when asked why GM created Saturn, here’s what I told him: “GM had made such a mess with its established makes and created so much bad will that management decided do an end-run around the self-generated problems, to create a façade make to co-op the unsophisticated who couldn’t see through the ruse.
It worked for a while, but in the usual GM action of the time, failed to follow-up by truly improving the product to give initial customers reason to buy again. Eventually market interests changed and Saturn became just another superfluous make.
If GM is doing THAT bad (and yes I know they have problems) then what is it that other companies (especially Japanese companies) are doing so much better? GM does make a couple of cars and a truck that I like (Camaro, Corvette, and standard cab short bed 2 wheel drive Silverado) The Japanese have nothing for me (not new anyway)
And the European companies have worse quality control problems than any American company, especially considering their price.
Regarding belts vs chains- the first car I ever personally bought was a 1988 Chevy Sprint Metro. Around 150k (!) the timing belt did break. The mechanic I towed it to wouldn’t even look at it as it was said to be an interference-type engine. Thereafter I was afraid of belt-types. My 2000 Corolla has a chain (sometimes I can hear it gently “singing”) and I just feel assured knowing it won’t just snap on a whim sometime.
Unfortunately it can (and eventually will) do just that. My ’70 Dodge 318 with 70,000+ miles on it cruised from Phoenix to Tucson, AZ just fine on I-10, I got of on my exit ramp, and just as I was pulling up to the stop light, it backfired a couple of times, and that was it. I tried to start it, and it just backfired a few more times. I had it towed to my sister and brother in laws house, and took a bus home. I came back a week later with a couple of friends, a pickup, and a car dolly, and towed it back home. I pulled the timing cover off (quite a job on a 318) and found the cam sprocket completely shattered, most of the pieces had dropped down in the oil pan. The chain was still hung up on the crankshaft sprocket. I pulled then right head, and found bent valves and a couple of broken pistons. At that point, I knew the engine was toast. My only regret was selling the car cheap instead of getting a replacement engine. It was a ’70 Challenger.
At least with my Pinto, I can watch the belt, and will replace it at the first sign of wear. Timing belts are not flimsy things. You could probably lift the weight of a small car with a timing belt. They are seriously reinforced. The 60,000 miles is a conservative figure, but I recommend it anyway, along with 3 month/3000 mile oil changes (no matter what kind of oil you use) Today’s engines are not cheap.
If your chain is making noise (usually kind of a slapping noise) then you may have a problem. Some such chains have tensioners on them, but the tensioner itself is prone to failure. Harley Davidson’s Twin Cam engine has a cam chain tensioner which is known to fail around 30,000 miles
Or, one could just replace the timing chain preemptively, at 150k or 15 years whichever comes first to be on the safe side (of course, with some engines that might be sooner, knowledge of the engine+components is required). Beats doing the belt job twice in that same span.
Rather to sell a commonplace small car, I think that Saturn’s should have to market the electric EV one and a range of electric vehicle. These new technology under the all new brand of saturn should have given a ligitimacy and should have prepare the future. Although and unfortunately, GM have worked by trial and error.
Saturn’s biggest fault was that it was, in fact, a separate entity within GM. Despite its styling similarities to the Cutlass (I didn’t even notice those photos at the top were of different cars at first) it ultimately was independent within the beast. It even had a separate UAW contract. But the result of this independence was that it made the other GM marques, who were all forced to share parts, bodies, designs, and workers, insanely jealous. They became determined to fold Saturn into the rest company, which they eventually succeeded in doing after the original brand cheerleaders retired or moved on to other things. I’d place blame on the L-Series (a car I currently drive) as it was the first Saturn that strayed from the founding principle of being independent from the rest of GM. Or maybe on the EV-1, a car that was supposed to be a Saturn but was kept from that role by the same corporate infighting that doomed it, and ultimately GM. Heck, you could even blame the uninspired second-gen S-Series, already feeling the heat from corporate. Ultimately, though, it was a sinking ship. The separate UAW contract died in 2004, and by the end, Saturn had basically been slotted into Oldsmobile’s old place in the GM hierarchy. I think Saturn actually WAS a pretty good idea. But GM itself ensured it would never succeed.
Special UAW Contract ended in 2005. 2006 models were built under the standard UAW contract.
Sorry: New contract started on Jan 1st 2005.
The original Saturn’s were ok basic transportation. In some ways quite decent and others they fell way short. The body proved to be quit durable. I had expected them to crumble like Cadillac fender extensions. The noisy 1.9 engine was quite durable if you kept dumping oil into it.. the list one had the rings too high up for proper oil control. The body in my opinion was ugly and looked like the headlights and tail lights were on the wrong end. They were cramped and the interiors were very plasticity and cheap. The ride sucked and so did the steering. For what it cost it was a dud. Not a pleasant car but a reasonably reliable one. Biggest issues mount and oil burning. The styling was awful as was the Oldsmobile it resembled. Some how that ugly.look became the Saturn look and then the question is where do you go from there? I never got the no haggle thing. I like haggling with idiot salesmen. Instead of improving the car the opel shit boxes ruined what was left of Saturn. It is amazing so much was spent to accomplish so little. Money should have been spent to fix Oldsmobile and Pontiac. Only decision gm basically got right was Buick back then. By brother in law has one and it serves him well. Its reliable and takes abuse and neglect well. Once he flipped it on its side and only damage was the passenger side mirror broke off. I hit it with my f 150 sliding in the mud and did no damage. So I guess it has good points. I still don’t like them but I prefer big Lincolns so this kind of car don’t do it for me.
One other thing that Saturn symbol emblem is awful looking too. Did it remind anyone of that commercial for flea treatments where the cartoon fleas are walking on a dog between the hairs??? The planet and rings look like hairs on that dog and like the fleas are waiting to appear.
I owned a 1992 Saturn SC for about 3 years. Paid $675.00 for it. It still looked nice, no dents or dings due to the plastic panels. Interior was a bit worn but not torn up. It ran and drove nice, also very dependable. Never had much oil consumption, 1qt every 2,000 miles or motor mount problems. Liked the performance button for the auto transmission. The only thing I had to replace was the starter. I got $300.00 when I sold it. The car cost me a little under $200.00 a year in capital cost and repairs. Not bad if I do say so myself. Since my son & daughter were still living at home, we had 4 cars in the driveway, all early 90’s models. The others were a Chevrolet Cavalier, a Dodge Lancer and a Ford Escort. In a ranking of these cars in my opinion the Saturn is first, then the Escort, then the Caviler and last the Lancer. This is just my opinion based on my experiences with these cars.
I can only agree. If Saturn would have stuck with making quirky little plastic cars that run 300,000 miles, they would still be in business. And I would probably own one. Why in the world would they try to sell re-branded German Opel cars like the Astra and the Aura that didn’t sell in Germany? Luckily there are millions of used quirky plastic Saturns out there that will keep us happy for the near future.
True, last versions of the S series [1997-2002] are still chugging along salty Chicago’s potholed streets. But, all the L series are crushed. Ions are dying off quick. Again, if only were made to replace the J cars.
Millions? I rather doubt that.
According to Wikipedia, there were roughly 2.5 million Saturn S series sold between 1990 to 2002. So at one point there were millions out there. It is hard to say how many remained in 2016. All I found was sources like this asking why so many of these old beaters are still around
https://www.quora.com/As-Saturn-vehicles-have-not-been-manufactured-for-13-years-why-are-there-still-so-many-seen-on-the-road-Is-it-because-they-re-such-good-cars-or-because-their-polymer-bodies-don-t-rust
Yes. I really liked the early plastic bodied models. Came very very close to buying one…until my uncle talked me out of it.
The important point is that GM understood accurately, for the first time, WHY people were buying Toyotas and Hondas. It wasn’t size or fuel economy or price or technical advancement, it was just plain old quality. And GM answered the question properly with non-union labor. A lot of those first-gen Saturns are still driving around, looking and sounding good.
A very expensive lesson that could have been learned by just focusing on the quality of their existing cars. Like they do now, with union labor too.
Line workers at the Saturn plant were members of the UAW. They worked, however, under a contract that was different from the standard UAW contract.
In the mid-1990s, I spoke with the man who was on the UAW team that negotiated that unique contract, which emphasized worker participation and union-management cooperation. He was an interesting fellow.
He said that, by the mid-1990s, both UAW leadership and GM leadership hated Saturn and that unique labor contract.
“… the Edsel of the modern era…”
To be fair, Edsel only lasted 2 calendar years, 3 model years. While Saturn could have cleared 20, if not for bankruptcy and redundancy. I can imagine a Saturn-GMC division still going, but then Buick is viable. Olds was down for the count.
Can say Scion is ‘modern Edsel’ in that it was merely rebadged Toyotas. But it’s all subjective.
OTOH: Saturn project should have been the J car replacement for Chevy and Pontiac, or maybe a companion to Buick?
Some did believe the hype of “not GM”, but when outgrew the SL’s what then? The LS [horrid name] was 7 years too late.
I compared it to Edsel because of the massive losses, which were big in both cases, but much bigger for Saturn.
You can imagine Saturn still going? Selling what? At the huge losses that it was operating at perpetually? It had to go; it was a colossal money hole.
Scion is not comparable in any way, as Toyota made plenty of profits selling Scions. There was essentially no investment in Scion, as they were just re-badged Toyotas sold as Toyotas elsewhere.
“Toyota made plenty of profits selling Scions.”
That’s kind of misleading. It’s true Scion was theoretically profitable because of the rampant rebadging, especially towards the end when they were slapping Scion badges on anything with 4 wheels, including Mazdas and Subarus.
Saturn lasted 20 years, from 1990-2010. Scion only 13, from 2003-2016. If Scion was such a success why was it discontinued so quickly? Most likely due to plunging sales. In 2006 Scion sold over 170,000 cars, however only four years later, sales had fallen massively to 45,678 for the 2010 model year.
With that kind of sales drop off, it’s hard to make an argument that Scion was a success. I think Scion had fallen same trap as Mitsubishi and ironically GM. Marketing cars to young buyers, many of whom had sub prime credit, thinking this would increase sales. In reality it seemed to have an opposite effect.
It’s apples and oranges. GM spent billions creating a completely new car company, factory, and a unique car. And that undertaking ended up costing well over $10 billion in losses.
Toyota spent peanuts in rebadging cars they were already building elsewhere. Scion wasn’t a unique “brand’, and certainly not a division. All Scions were legally Toyotas (that’s how they’re titled); it was just a different set of Toyotas being sold in a Toyota showroom, serviced by the same Toyota dealers, but carrying a different badge. So yes, Scions were profitable; there was no additional expense. Sure, it wound down, but the Scions were just rebranded as Toyotas. No real expense in winding down a sub brand whose purpose had passed.
The market had changed, smaller cars were not selling as well, and it simply made no more sense to sell these cars as Scions.
Sure, you could say that they should have just sold the xB and such as Toyotas. But what difference would it have made? Not much, in the big picture.
I can assure you that Toyota made a nice profit on most/all the Scions they ever sold.
If Scion failed because nobody wanted small cars anymore then how come the Kia Soul, which is the closest modern car to a Scion, has increased sales from 2009-2016. If Kia could increase sales during the time Scion was alive, why couldn’t Scion?
In 2009 31,621 were sold. Four years later in 2013 the number jumped to 118,079, by the time of Scion’s demise in 2016 the number rose again to 145,768 cars.
If you’re going to misrepresent what I wrote, I’m not going to respond anymore. I wrote “smaller cars were not selling well”, not “nobody wanted small cars”. There’s a world of difference between the two.
I’m not defending certain product decisions Toyota made; I’ve already lambasted the gen2 xB, which was their biggest product flop, and directly led to the Soul becoming so popular.
My point was not to defend Scion, but simply to point out that Scion didn’t cost Toyota some $10-12 billion in losses; Toyota made money on selling these cars.
Frankly, Scion was kind of dumb; they should have just sold the original xB as a Toyota. But it didn’t make much difference in the end.
I test drove an SL model back in the day for my radio feature. It was okay but certainly not on par with any Japanese car. I had a friend who owned a Civic drive it for a few minutes. He was somewhat impressed, but not enough he said that he would ever buy a Saturn.
Years later there are still Saturns driving around. I have a co-worker whose noisy little SL provides basic transportation to and from work.
Five billion dollars. Let me repeat that figure cited by this article, FIVE BILLION DOLLARS. Five billion ultimately flushed down the toilet by GM. Toyota had reportedly committed one billion dollars in its development of the excellent Lexus LS400, introduced in autumn of 1989 as a 1990 model, a product and investment that has paid non arguable, incredibly positive financial, technical, and managerial benefits for Toyota to this very day. The ultimate reason for the incredible number of successive, cascading deadly sins of GM, as Paul alludes to, was the inept central management of GN epitomized by the likes of the disastrous and misguided leadership of Roger Smith.
Interestingly, I can report that currently GM appears to have in recent past turned a corner in terms of product quality. The most reliable car that I have ever owned, and that I owned for twenty years, was a 1992 Lexus LS400 which I traded in for a 2012 Generation 1 Chevy Volt, purchased January 2012, for, soon to be, 5 years of flawless, enjoyable ownership. So after decades of inept product development, my Volt experience suggests that GM seems to have finally escaped from the Deadly Sin Managerial Trap. The Volt, like the initial LS400, was over engineered, built for quality, and has delivered product excellence probably at a financial loss or barely at a breakeven point for GM. This is a different GM mindset from the bean counter times of the Vega, X cars, etc leading to the multiple documented product deadly sins. I hope that this excellence model persists in the GM resurrected since the bankruptcy.
Great post. I owned an LS400 too and had a great (if shorter) experience with the car. I’m always interested by people who want so badly to see a resurgence from GM. Why is that?
Ultimately the US needs to have a successful manufacturing base to contribute to employment, so a successful GM, and for that matter a successful FoMoCo and their supplier chain have a material effect on North American prosperity. Additionally more successful competitors in the market place give consumers, us, ultimately more market place choices. Who can reasonably complain about that?
For years I and my family have been loyal Honda and Toyota Fanboys, so I was really surprised by what I found in the Volt in 2012, my first domestic toe-in -the-water purchase in years. After almost 5 years of ownership, rarely seeing the dealership–only returning for the biyearly required service, I am heartened by a possible real GM turn around. As a plus, I have actually enjoyed my Volt ownership.
My wife initially was scared of the technology it contained calling it “my starship” with a “Star Wars” dash display but now she enjoys the effortless silence of electric driving.
I hope GM keeps it up and remains on track.
Five billion dollars. Let me repeat that figure cited by this article, FIVE BILLION DOLLARS. Five billion ultimately flushed down the toilet by GM.
No, it was estimated to be at least $10 billion, more likely $12 billion, in total accumulated losses by Saturn.
And I hope your Volt continues to be good for you. It’s starting to develop a rather nasty reputation; CR has dropped its reliability rankings to the bottom of its class.I had a tenant who bought a used one from a Chevy dealer, and it never worked right, and eventually had to get the dealer to take it back. There have been class-action lawsuits on Volt issues.
Two replies:
1. Regarding the Five Billion figure, I just quoted your figure in the initial article. I agree that with the later close down expenses could have inflated total costs to 10+ or even 12+ billion. Ultimately all of that capital literally being flushed down the toilet.
The prior bankruptcy losses of GM, as I have been told, have actually been reducing GM’s taxable liabilities for the past few years and has helped GM be more than competitive vis-a vis Ford which didn’t go through actual bankruptcy.
2. Regarding the 2012 Volt, my car was not a first year production model, and it has been remarkably trouble free without any effort on my part except routine servicing, so I can’t comment about the problems of others. The current generation 2 Volt first year production models have been described as troublesome by Consumers Reports. This could be due to the change over to a new model, or could be a harbinger of recurrent beancounter induced cheapening which plagued GM in the past. We will see as time goes on. Hopefully my car will remain trouble free.
3. It has been my habit of keeping cars happily running for decades,( i.e my 1973 914 2.0 that you drove last May and that I have owned for 37 years), by immediately attending to issues that that develop. BTW since your drove the 914 we rebuilt the transaxle replacing worn synchros and shifting collars making the shifting much improved from what you experienced.
My wife still has a 2001 Jag XJ8 that has been a great reliable car which we have owned for 13 years. Likely non abusive owners immediately attentive to resolving minor flaws before they become major issues keep cars on the road virtually forever, like DC3’s flying forever.
Cheers.
Not often reported is Toyota’s ability to develop new models quickly and efficiently.
I wonder how many Volts would sell without Federal or State rebates.
These are the GM cars I grew up with. I guess I never understood the GM mystique or peoples’ love affair with the general. The GM cars of the 80s and 90s peppered my thoughts of their later AND earlier cars. Other than from a styling and marketing standpoint, when was the last time GM cars were leading the competition? 1950?
GM was great at making indifferent products look good and their marketing organization made people feel good about them, but ultimately people who bought GM cars were left with a GM car.
It didn’t hit me originally, but that early promo picture for Saturn shows a smiling Roger Smith and . . . F. James McDonald. McDonald is the guy who followed Delorean to run both Pontiac (1969) and Chevrolet (1973). The fact that instead of quitting in frustration he went on to become the President of GM under Roger Smith’s chairmanship tells us all we need to know about his management philosophy.
Ahh I can finally comment. Had a 98 SW1. Burned some oil — engine coarse and noisy but we were rear ended and totalled on I-95 and the crumple zones worked really well and we walked away with one bloody nose and bent glasses from the driver’s airbag.
So, considering that our now adult but then 3 year old was in the back seat, not a bad car!
Back in my high school/college days I would occasionally detail cars for extra cash and I detailed one of these owned by a doctor strangely enough. The drive in it back to his office was enough to turn me off of these completely. I remember the HVAC switchgear on par with Fisher Price with regards to fluidity of movement and tactile feel. Not to mention the buzzing coming from the dash.
And this was the result of 5 billion dollars ?!
I’m a big fan of classic GM cars but man what happened?
I had a ’93 SL2 with a stick. I think you’re wrong about the styling. Yes, it looked very superficially like an Olds, but at a deeper level it looked totally different. It was also much cleaner, and very sporty-looking. They hadn’t shown the Saturns in the original ads, and so the first time I saw one, I had no way of knowing it was a Saturn (and I certainly wouldn’t have mistaken it for an Olds). But I knew instantly what it was. Women would compliment me for the car. It also handled beautifully. A friend of mine who had raced loved to drive it.
But there was that damn engine growl like a coffee grinder, and the damn thing quickly began using a lot of oil. It also was pretty weak.
but had Saturn simply consistently improved the original, without changing the styling, I’d still be driving one. But instead, they dumbed it down. The first time I saw a second gen Saturn, I didn’t know whether I was looking at a Hyundai, a Tercel, or an Olds. And the handling was gone (I test drove one when I was getting an oil change). More details here: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/the-truth-about-saturn/
They must have big plans for Saturn, Ive seen two in person and another for sale on trademe all RHD they most likely got here via Japan so GM obviouly figured they were good enough to export to make RHD versions, mind you they thought that of the Cavalier and even convinced Toyota to put their brand on them we have those too in both flavours Chevrolet and Toyota and both leave a sour taste, we expect Chevrolets to have a healthy V8 motor out here and Toyotas to be at least reliable, its just what we’re used to.
I have a 97 SL2 in southern Wisconsin. Runs great. Twenty year old Civics and Corollas are scarce around here, but twenty year old Saturns are common. That has to be worth something.
Where I used to live in DC, there was a road with a sharp but shallow angle. The stones in the pavement were pretty smooth, and after I got my ’93 SL2, I discovered that when the road was wet, I could yank the wheel a bit hard going into that curve, and the car would drift very evenly and predictably. Just one of the aspects of driving dynamics that made that first gen saturn a joy to drive
Hands down, the Saturn Division was started because GM believed they could extract more profit margin from a small car by selling it no-haggle. When a customer bought a Saturn @ full sticker retail and went to trade it some years later @ wholesale, especially at a competing brand, they were not very happy.
On the one hand, when I bought my ’93 (new), I’d looked at late model used saturns and the depreciation was so tiny that it didn’t make sense to get one used. On the other hand, in inflation-adjusted dollars, the price I paid was $24,200 (with ABS, AC, Cruise)–which seems like a hell of a lot for that car. So I suspect you’re correct.
But I would have paid probably around the same for an Integra, which is what I shopped it against. On the other hand, an Integra would have lasted a lot longer.
You know, we can see this automotive historian is clearly biased to focus on all the failures of Saturn, in the writing of this article.
Allow me to put some very positive successes of Saturn S-Series, as it was the only “true” Saturn model, with all succeeding models being “cross-platform” from other GM-Divisions.
1. Used Car Market: Saturn S-Series, despite having ended production 15 years ago, still are very plentiful at used car dealerships and often sought out for their great fuel economy and corrosion-free bodies.
2. Dent/Corrosion resistant body: Once again, despite being a model that is nearly 30 years old, a well-cared for amd maintained Saturn S-Series can retain its showroom quality, even today.
3. Easy Repairs: While most newer, “technological advanced” scrap heaps from the Japanese can still last as many miles as any S-Series, try to work on one. Try to find cheap parts for one. When something does break, on an S-Series, MOST(not all) repairs can be made with hand tools, while in your driveway. I know, because I just restored a 1995 SC2. The rear suspension, fuel tank, brakes, valve cover, transmission valve body and cooling lines, plugs, wires, cooling fan, fender and headlamp, and even my emergency brake cables were all serviceable with a $40 tool kit purchased at Target. No fancy code scanners, no laptop needed to “tune” the PCM. Just a couple of driving ramps, and a couple of jack stands.
3. Reliability: Saturn 1.9L engines are known for “stuck oil control rings”, which eventually lead to excessive oil consumption. Despite this design flaw, keeping up on your oil changes and adding oil as needed can keep these engines running well over 300,000-400,000 miles, with some Saturn owners still on the road at over 600,000 miles, on a factory-installed timing chain. Ask any mechanic, and they will likely tell you that Saturns are “good cars”.
4. Styling: This applies to the SC packages, moreso than the SL packages. The SC packages were sharp and sporty, to which GM hit their mark, as the SC literally stands for “Sport Coupe”.
5. Performance: When someone thinks a Saturn is a slug, they are commonly referring to the 8-valve, SOHC 1.9L engines, which featured a very low 85hp, until MPFI was added in 1995. This brought the HP up to 100hp. But, let’s talk “Twin Cam” for a minute. While all years are rated for 124hp and that seems a tad low, remember this: That is 124hp in a car that only weighs between 2,200-2,300 lbs. STOCK SC2 models, with a 5-speed, could achieve mid 15s in the ¼-mile. That would decimate ANY Japanese imploding, timing belt, fart-can mufflered import of the 1990s by a full 1.5-2.0 secs in the ¼-mile. It even rivaled the V-8 Ford Mustangs of that day. Even still today, the power-to-weight ratio of the S-Series rivals and competes with many offering from the automakers across the board. I would say that was quite a success, for an econobox that averaged anywhere between 30-40mpg in the 1990s. I sure didn’t see any Civics doing that, back then, and not when I was smoking them left and right with a mildly built Quad OHC/5-Speed in my 2,900lbs 1993 Pontiac Grand Am. I also owned a 1992 Honda Accord. My 1995 SC2 would gut that thing, in a ¼-mile, out corner it, and last just as long as it did, AND it had a 5-speed. My Saturn has an automatic.(I sold the Honda, with 225,000+ miles and only ever replaced the clutch @ 191,000).
6. Brand Loyalty: If you check the history of Saturn, what caused it to fail/succeed, you will find that many Saturn owners would not buy other brands. Part of researching how the Japanese were kicking our American asses in market share, was actually studying Toyota and how they built cars in Japan. Saturn tried to emulate that, and they succeeded. The 1991 models were on backorder at most dealerships. 70% of trade-in vehicles, during a new Saturn S-Series purchase, were foreign imports such as the Honda Civic. Much of Saturn’s failures are attributed to internal GM/UAW politics. The UAW HATED the fact that Saturns were produced by workers that were willing to work with the management. A little known fact showing that Saturn workers loved making their cars: The Spring Hill, TN facility had an absentee rate of only 2.5%, as compared to the 14% corporate average at all other GM plants across the US. And the Saturn employees were paid only 80% of the wages that other GM workers get paid, as per the Master Contract the UAW has with them. Does anyone else find it strange that the S-Series production workers made 20% less money, yet they hardly ever missed work? It should also be known, that the Spring Hill, TN plant NEVER had a strike during the S-Series production years. The UAW authorized a strike, but it never happened. GM and the UAW killed Saturn. The technology of those radically advanced cars proves, everytime one drives off a used car dealership, that Saturn overall was a success for what an automobile in its class should be.
I will take my discontinued GM product, with 95% parts content coming from the USA(Another Saturn fact), that I can maintain and repair myself, over any of that new “advanced” junk that rolls off the assembly lines today.
Would anyone like me post an update, after I flip my odometer back to 000,000?
Replying to an old post, but why not?
Unions screwed up a lot but it is not better in the work force with none.
And we’re getting there.
Ask anyone who used to be middle class who now gets $10 an hour. Or $7.25.
And wouldn’t even get that if many companies had their way because apparently being free market means you can treat people horribly because, you know, people are just little piles of money to exploit to no end.
Because they can. In the movie Wall Street Gordon Gekko was supposed to be the bad guy. Not a template for the future.
And companies always need more. And more. And more. And more. And more.
They REALLY don’t like to share. Sharing is for socialists and dirty hippies.
Sharing and caring is bad and you’re supposed to think it’s the unions fault.
Or teachers. Or firemen. Or anyone but who is ruining this country with endless greed.
Pay attention and quit falling for the distractions.
People need to be treated like human beings. That isn’t political.
It’s the difference between a decent life and a dystopian nightmare, which is where we’re headed now.
Some people won’t see that until it happens to them.
And it will. When there’s no meat left on the worker’s bones they will come for you too.
Unions made the middle class and they need to return.
Or do working people really think it’s better now?
Well I sure was in a mood there wasn’t I😀?
My neighbour has a c.2001 Saturn SC1 3 door coupe, which she has always spoken highly of. This winter it managed a 3500 mile return trip from Vancouver to San Diego with apparently no problems. The body and paint job look very good for a car its age.
And the best thing about the third gen(2000-2002) S-Series 1.9L SOHC, they had a different casting design from the 1991-1998 models years.
The first and second gen Sx1 trims were prone to head cracks, at the #5 cam journal(right above the coolant outlet to the upper radiator hose). This caused the oil and coolant to mix, inevitably blowing the engine..
Saturn responded by extending the warranty, from 60,000 miles, to 6 years/100,000 miles, and would replace the cylinder heads at no charge for customers under the free extended warranty.
There was one major issue, that could be rectified in about 4 hours, with the 2000-2002 Sx1 trims: The Intake Manifold Gasket
Blamed on robots erroneously torqueing the manifold bolts, the gasket would shrink(more likely a result of Death-Kill Orange “Extended Junk” coolant), causing high idle and a DTC P0301, for #1 cylinder misfire.
No matter what anyone says, about the benefits that Saturn brought to the table, as you read Paul’s stories, you will see he clearly has a strong bias against GM(Probably had an N-Body, with the 3400 SFI and its Death-Kill Orange eating head gasket/intake gasket problems, at some point in his life).
Not saying that Saturn was the panacea, that Roger Smith thought it would be, but it certainly wasn’t a failure in all aspects, and certainly not a Deadly Sin..
The rebadged Saturns were the real deadly sins, at GMs 14th floor.
The original gen 1 Saturns were sporty both in appearance and in the way they drove, but with big flaws in the engines. They dumbed them down in ’96, when GM pulled Saturn back into the Mother Ship–alas.
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/the-truth-about-saturn/
Just wanted all you to know I am still driving a 2005 Saturn Relay which I love. My daughter purchased it new when her two boys were small and I bought it from her . It now has 240,000 miles on it and the only things that have been replaced are batteries, tires, wind shield wipers and one water hose in 14 years. Yes, it is old, but it is easy to drive, has plenty of space and storage room. The paint has held up, the upholstery is in good shape (driver seat a little worn) and gas mileage is reasonable. Would love to have one just like it with updated gadgets such as GPS, etc.
Interesting reading about the smugness of the buyers never paying list. My how things have changed, heh?
Exactly what I was thinking. “You think you can buy a car for sticker? Not at THIS dealership, kid.”
But admittedly, when we’re taking about how long ago 11 years was, the distance from 2011-2018 sure doesn’t seem as long as that from 2019-2022.
Saturn SL development cash should have went bringing the Astra platform to US to replace J cars. And even if they did build the SL, why not have had a “Geo Saturn”?
Sure, Saturn built loyal buyers, but then the SUV/truck market took over. Thinking those buyers would go to GM brands was folly. Also, they rebadged GM vehicles for Saturn dealers, becoming another brand competing for same buyers. We all know what happened next.
Gearheads should run car companies. Period. Sure, they’ll need a marketing and finance background too. First, be a car guy though. GM painted itself into a corner in several important ways on the Saturn program. A car guy would have known better. Where are people like Walter P. Chrysler, Lee Iacocca and John Z. DeLorean today? I think somebody like Jay Leno would be the right type of person to run a car company. Most of us here on this site could get the same results or even better for less money than these big corporations. Thing is, enthusiasts like us are the ones putting our thoughts into the car business from our unique perspective.
Old enough to remember when “Saturn” was the emblem on the Oldsmobile. 1948, I think.
Jay Leno is a retired actor-talk show host who is rich enough to be able to afford a very fine personal collection of collectible cars. With a resume such as this, what car company would even give him a job interview? For any job? Seriously? He has no qualifications. None!
Rode in “countless” ones. Drove a 2000 “SL” sdn once. Was my brother/sister in law’s.
Kinda reminded me of driving an “80 Chev Monza”. Saturn seemed to have more plastic feel though.
It was reasonably new when I drove it though.
As a foreigner, American GM has always seemed odd to me. All those brands treading on one another’s toes – yes, I know it wasn’t originally like that. Pontiac seemed a better-styled (usually) Chevy alternative, and I could never get the hang of why you’d buy an Oldsmobile rather than a Buick. Cadillac, yeah, you need a halo car for folk to aspire too. GMC seemed pointless too. Then GM brings out yet another division – what??? Where was this supposed to fit in?
I remember thinking at the time it was weird for GM to create another division with all of that personnel overload to build what seemed to be an alternative to its own J-car. Was that admitting the J was wrong and the new Saturn was right? Hmm. Yet they kept the J in production (and never extended the Saturn technology). Shooting themselves in the foot?
And I also remember thinking there had to be a reason nobody else used this form of construction in a mass-market car. Would people trust another innovation from GM, after the Vega et. al.? Then ask, Would people have trusted this sort of constructional innovation from Toyota or Honda?
Was the creation of Saturn an admission that GM’s reputation with the buying public was – let’s be diplomatic – somewhat shaky? You can try to manipulate public perception of a company through advertising, sure, but for a more permanent effect, you need to implement lasting quality in the product, not just advertise.
And nowadays I wonder what all that money spent on Saturn could have achieved for the other divisions.
Score points for trying to improve the dealership experience though – but I gather that wasn’t permanent either.
Well, Honda (to name one) made rather extensive use of plastic outer panels on the EA Civic and CRX, including fenders, rocker panel covers, and the like. They didn’t try to make it a unique selling point in the same way, and so it wasn’t much remarked upon.
In a word, yes. By the time the SL debuted, there were quite a few American buyers who were extremely wary of GM cars in this class, and who were rather prejudiced against small domestic cars in general. There were a variety of reasons: past product disasters (the Chevrolet Citation left a bad taste for many), poor dealer service, and the fact that the domestic automakers had a tendency to allow mediocre small(er) cars linger well past the point where they were competitive except on price.
When you compared GM or other domestic small cars, there was a definite sense that they were products the manufacturer would just as soon not have built, offered solely to compete in a market they didn’t really want to have to be in and considered beneath them. This extended to products like the late ’80s Chevrolet Nova, which was a Corolla clone built in California, with a Toyota powertrain. The Chevrolet badge was a turnoff to people whose past experience was with the Citation and Vega, or the dismal U.S. Chevette, and if you were willing to look past that, perhaps on knowledge that the Nova was a Toyota under the skin, it was still no fun dealing with resentful Chevrolet dealers who would obviously rather you bought a REAL (read: more profitable) car.
The promise of Saturn was that it was a NEW division with NEW products, so there was at least a chance that it wouldn’t be another GM small car pratfall, and it had new dealerships offering a different kind of customer service, so if you went for a test drive, there was a chance it might not just be the salesman trying to browbeat you into buying a Lumina or Cutlass Supreme instead.
Had the SL been a Chevrolet or Oldsmobile, I certainly wouldn’t have given it the benefit of the doubt in 1990–1991, and it’s clear a fair number of other American buyers felt similarly.
To add to AUWM’s comment, there is a point to be made about GM’s Divisions. In the old days, they were quite independent, with their own engines and even unique frames. All that was shared was a common body shell (or two). Otherwise, for the most part they ran their own engineering, manufacturing and sales operations independently of the others. From the late 60s those Divisions began ceding more and more responsibility to the GM mother ship. The Vega was not a product of Chevrolet Engineering, but by GM Engineering. GM Assembly Division took over all of the factories. By the 80s GM’s Divisions had been reduced to marketing operations.
Saturn, for a brief time, marked a return of an actual, genuine, full-strength GM Division. It built its own design in its own plant and displayed something unique, but with a GM flavor (like all GM cars used to be). But within a very short time the GM borg swallowed up Saturn (the Division) just as it had swallowed up the others, until the product became just another GM vehicle with slightly different styling.
Yes, that was the rationale for creating Saturn. But it was a highly flawed one, for two reasons:
1. GM’s market share had been dropping rapidly, so they already had too many divisions as it was.
2. If you want to convince the GM skeptics that GM can build a good small car, the solution is to build it and sell it as a Chevy, and accept the fact that it might take a few years for its reputation to be established and heal Chevy’s image. As it was, Saturn just weakened Chevy. You don’t fix a bad rep by starting a new (fully owned) company. Saturn likely brought in some GM-skeptic buyers, but that’s not a long-range solution. But then GM and a lot of American cars don’t think long range.
When Toyota’s Crown bombed here in 1958, they didn’t start a new company/brand; the took a break and figured out what the US market wanted and made it.
The Big Three HAD to figure out how to make better cars, and they did eventually. There’s little or no quality gap between them and the Japanese anymore. How was Saturn supposed to fit into the long-term picture when GM was having to downsize and cull brands?
I will say, I (and quite a few people I knew) would never have considered a Chevrolet, especially a C-segment Chevrolet, in that time period. The brand would have been an absolute dealbreaker. If Chevrolet had released a very decent, competitive small car at that point, it would have taken until the middle of a subsequent generation reviews said was equally good or better before I would have been willing to contemplate even test-driving it. In my view at the time, Chevrolet made NO desirable cars in 1990, in any price class — every single model seemed cheaply made and badly compromised — and hadn’t in my lifetime.
However, I did look at the Saturn SL and SC when they came out and compared them to other cars in that class as something at least worth a look. They had a couple of interesting features (the twin-cam engine and the availability of four-wheel discs with ABS, which the U.S. Civic and Corolla didn’t offer at that point), and the plastic body panels seemed like a usefully practical feature, even though I didn’t love the styling. There were too many “Yeah, buts” to put it in the first rank, but it seemed like a decent effort. If they had kept building on that, I thought they would have had something, but they didn’t and after a while it became painfully obvious that they weren’t going to.
Agreed, in that some folks who wouldn’t have looked at a Chevy might look at a Saturn. But a healthy number of folks were looking and buying Geos at Chevy dealers. Maybe they should have branded it a Geo. 🙂
My overarching point is this: losing $10-12 billion in an effort to get GM-skeptics to look and buy your new small car is simply not a good business proposition.
I was a strong Saturn skeptic when they came out. Not because the cars were bad, but I thought the whole concept was flawed, and that GM was destined to screw it up eventually, which they did.
If you’re going to spend that kind of money, spend it on serious efforts to improve your existing brands and cars.
If GM had to wait a few years to convince skeptics that this was a good car, that would have been both a whole lot cheaper, plus it would have repaired Chevy’s image. That alone would have been worth a few billion.
Ford in the late 70s had a rep for mediocre quality, but the Job #1 effort really did pay off for them. Not that they were suddenly in Toyota’s league, but it really did make them more palatable. I’m convinced that’s why Ford did so vastly better in CA at the time than Chevy (along with some more advanced-looking product). But if Ford’s rep had still been in the cellar, I doubt they would have done as well as they did with their cars in CA at the time.
Chevy/GM needed a serious “Job #1” commitment; not just lip service, but the real thing.
I can take this one step further: that the existence of Saturn actually tarnished Chevy’s/GM’s image even further. If all their effort to make “good” cars were going into Saturn, why would I as a consumer think they were putting any effort into their other brands, and more realistically, letting them languish.
If your product is not up to snuff, the solution is to bring it up to snuff, not spend insane amounts of money starting a competing new brand.
Dealing with a Chevrolet dealership in buying a Geo or having it serviced was not at all a pleasant experience, as I recall it, and was certainly not a recommendation. This isn’t to say Toyota and Honda dealers were or are necessarily any great model of dealership experience, but the Geo brand brought with it an additional layer of obvious resentment from salespeople and service departments at having to deal with a car they didn’t seem very happy to be offering. (I imagine the experience of buying an Opel from a Buick dealer was often similar.) The main selling point, at least for the Prizm, was the prospect of getting a car related to and nearly as good as a contemporary Corolla for a bunch less money.
My point here is that there was no real reason to expect that pouring a bunch of money into new Chevrolet (or Pontiac, or Oldsmobile) products would have had any great chance of winning over people who had given up on GM brands in this class. From a product standpoint, as soon as it became a Chevrolet (or a Pontiac, or an Oldsmobile), it would almost certainly have ended up becoming a parts-bin special, with a new body shell and a lot of the same running gear that made it hard to take the latter-day Cavalier seriously as anything other than a rental car. If miraculously it didn’t, existing Chevrolet (or Pontiac, or Oldsmobile) dealers would likely have greeted it with the same resentment as they did Geo: a different car that wasn’t a big cash cow and that required a bunch of new parts and new tools and new training to service and fix, even if it was still an official divisional product and not a hand-me-down.
There was no practical way GM could have pushed any major changes in dealership experience across its thousands of existing franchises without disaster and probably lawsuits. Even if they had, the impact of the new product would have been diluted by sharing floor space with a bunch of carryover models in other classes, leaving buyers with choices like whether to pay no-haggle list for the new model or look for a massive markdown on the Corsica gathering dust on the other side of the showroom. It would have been mixed messages up and down the line, and a real obstacle even if the new product had been both class-leading and nearly flawless.
I’m not saying that Saturn wasn’t a massive financial black hole — it was — or that starting a new division in hopes of teaching your existing six disappointing ones a lesson was a sound business strategy — it wasn’t. I don’t at all dispute that it was a Deadly Sin, since that much is plain.
However, I don’t think it was a Deadly Sin because they should have just poured all that money into the existing divisions, or that they should have consolidated divisions and poured money into those (and into the inevitable class action suits from dealers) instead. I think the central lesson of Saturn was that by the late ’80s, GM had so many deep, serious organizational problems, at so many levels and resulting from so many different bad decisions over the years that it seemed the only way to get out from under seemed to be starting a new division from scratch — and even that didn’t work.
A related issue, which would have been harder to reconcile, is that aside from all of the existing divisions, GM had many, many existing products. Within the existing divisional and dealer structures, there were always going to be mixed messages for buyers, compounded by the fact that it would have been difficult to avoid price overlap.
GM tended to exacerbate this problem by keeping older models around for as long as they could continue to squeeze a few more dollars out of them. For instance, keeping the A-body Cutlass Ciera around for 14 years didn’t do Oldsmobile’s image any favors, but it was obviously profitable (and the late A-bodies were decent cars if you liked that sort of thing); killing it earlier might have helped sell the Achieva, but the cost of doing that would also have added to the real cost of new products.
This wasn’t a problem that Toyota, Honda, and Nissan really had in the U.S. market, at least not to nearly the same extent. (Toyota had issues with it in the home market, especially when they started switching to FWD, although they dealt with it better than GM did here.)
Saturn avoided that problem initially, although they then managed to recreate it in the opposite direction, demonstrating that they didn’t have any kind of long-term product plan (or at least none they actually implemented). To your point, that was obviously a major factor in the folly of the idea — developing a complete second product portfolio was not financially sustainable — but it illustrates the depth of the problem. Saturn was an attempt to paper over not just one but many mistakes and missteps.
Saturn was an attempt to paper over not just one but many mistakes and missteps.
That’s a perfect summation, and exactly how I saw it at the time.
I remember I got a flyer in the mail, in the early Saturn days. Probably a couple of them. have to admit they looked pretty promising. At least interesting. But that’s as far as I went.
I had a coworker for a time. I swear it seemed like she was following me as I had to deal with her from 3 different departments, including finally mine. And oh, what a wit** she was. I once warned her, if I ever get to that middle office… Anyway, she was not a car person. She oft stated she hated to drive, and just as often smugly said, “I drive a Saturn” Gee, I wonder if there could be a connection.
I’ve also heard of interviews with other GM division managers who said, if you gave me XXX billion I could have done…
I’ve also heard as many cars grew to have an expected lifespan of over 200K, Saturns were oil gluttons at 100K.
My now-wife had a 1996 SL with a manual when we met. Cool points because she could and did drive a stick. I think other than a cassette player that thing didn’t have a single option, but “They had one that was purple and looked really good, but it had a leather interior and every option. I’m not paying for leather in a ~Saturn~.” Was her first car after being totalled by a drunk driver so the space frame construction and airbags sold her – and in more than one parking lot the plastic panels did as advertised and showed no damage.
From what others have reported, it seems like by 96 the worst bugs had been worked out. The only two major issues to crop up were a cracked head (fully covered under a recall well past the car’s warranty) and a shifter cable decided to serve up only the odd-numbered gears.
The updated interior at least didn’t seem to scream “cheap” at the very top of its lungs and was free of the motorized belts and easily maintained. I was always curious if the DOHC drivetrain was more friendly, the SOHC was a bit raucous but didn’t seem to hate being revved, and turned shockingly good gas mileage. I don’t think our garage has hit numbers that high since. I can’t imagine it was as good as a comparable Civic – but it wasn’t the s***box so many were looking down at.
If parts availability hadn’t started to become an issue, I’d found some SW2s that looked attainable – knowing full well the plastic panels made skin-deep beauty a risk on Saturns, who knows what dark secrets lay in 25-year-old mechanicals and electrics?
Now between the article and the comments it’s almost 100% “How stupid, what was GM thinking?” but all with the benefit of hindsight. Equally with the benefit of hindsight, we all know at that point the writing appeared to be on the wall for Oldsmobile. I’d be curious to see an alternate timeline where Saturn was primed from the get-go with plans for a larger car and not need to phone it in later with the L-Series, AND with the Aurora– which looked NOTHING like any Olds product at the time– as the top-dog Saturn as we begin winding down Oldsmobile.
Now you’re aiming for the import intenders Saturn was looking for at the bottom AND top-end.