My parents wanted a Saturn in the mid 90’s. The closest dealer was several hundred miles away. There was a six month waiting list to get one. My parents couldn’t wait that long and bought a Nissan.
I remember a lot of news and reviews of Saturn cars. People raving about how reliable they were. Most of the people I knew were talking about getting a Saturn. I vaugely recall Consumer Reports giving them a high rating.
IIRC weren’t Saturn’s a Japanese car built in the US?
I haven’t paid much attention to the car market recently. I had assumed the brand had continued in popularity.
I was shocked to learn Saturn went under. There’s a thread in MPSIMS I didn’t want to derail.
What happened is that GM found it more cost efficient to basically make the same parts and use the same designs from their other car lines and then call them “Saturns”. When the brand declined in popularity as a result (probably because the overall GM brand’s quality standards are best described as “mediocre”), they killed it.
I remember a news article profiling the Japanese managers that ran the Saturn plant in Tennessee. Their style of management wasn’t going over too well. The pep rally before the shift started. Group Exercises etc. Common in Japan. But the Tennessee workers didn’t understand that culture.
I got the impression the culture gap wasn’t anything that couldn’t be worked out.
I owned two Saturns, one for 19 years and another for about 15 before a tree fell on it. The first still ran perfectly well, but the body had rusted from the salt on the roads.
Saturns were built in the US, in a plant at Spring Hill, TN. They even held a “family reunion” of all Saturn owners there every year. It originally was designed to compete with Japanese cars and were very good in every respect.
But there was jealousy between the divisions of GM, who resented Saturn getting money instead of them (Saturn was never particularly profitable). So GM abandoned them for their other divisions. The car started dropping popularity in the late 90s, when their design was considered passe (I loved, and still love, the original Saturn look). GM was slow to make design changes, and when they finally did, it was half-hearted. Eventually new GM management let it die.
The slogan was “A different kind of company / A different kind of car” and they did succeed at doing that the first few years. But it was a GM brand, and GM’s bean-counting and corporate culture eventually diluted Saturn into just another Pontiac, and then they couldn’t justify its existence anymore.
AFAIK, no Japanese were involved in making the Saturn. It was a true startup, an American car through-and-through. That was a big selling point; I remember needing a rental while they did some bodywork and they insisted it be an US car because Saturn owners didn’t want anything to do with Japan.
Saturn also started out with a non-standard labor contract; the UAW didn’t like that.
I know Saturn is the car my parents wanted and there was a waiting list in the mid 90’s.
The Japanese/US car may have been another brand. IIRC they were Japanese cars manufactured here to avoid import fees. The plant was managed by Japanese managers sent to work in the US.
I probably merged the two memories. I’ve never been a car guy.
I bought a 2008 Saturn Vue, which was after GM announced they were doing away with the brand. I had never looked at them before because they refused to negotiate on price, but in 2008 they were desperate to get rid of stock and I got it for less than factory invoice. The timing was perfect, as I was retiring and needed a vehicle that I could tow behind my RV with all four tires on the ground, which was a design feature of the Saturn. My only regret was that I had to sell my 2006 Chrysler 300, which I loved.
When the Saturn line up was the SL and SC series, with plastic bodies, they were great cars for the price.
Later, as has been meetioned, GM cheaped out, and the cars were no longer unique and not longer such a good deal.
Chefguy, why would you not want a car with a “no haggling” policy? Usually that means the salesmen are paid differently, no high pressure sales and the prices are lower than most people can negotiate anyway.
You may be thinking of NUMMI, the GM/Toyota plant that made the Geo Prizm, Chevy Nova, Pontiac Vibe, Toyota Matrix, Toyota Corolla, and Toyota Tacoma. Or you may be thinking of the Geo line, with a series of cars produced by GM in joint ventures with Japanese companies or rebadged Japanese cars.
The salient fact that I recall from previous reading on the subject, touched on but not really fully explained in the above cited Forbes article, is that Saturn was Roger Smith’s personal vanity project to challenge the presumed superiority of Japanese and German cars. The objective above all was to prove that a mass-produced American car could be just as good if not better, and profitability or business viability be damned. To that end, one of the unique things about the Saturn plant was that it was a greenfield model of high automation, built from scratch with the highest level of robotics and production automation. I’m less clear on how it all eventually fell apart, but in general the fact that it was never properly conceived as a viable business had a lot to do with it.
Comparing the price posted on the vehicle with what internet sites said should be paid always showed that they were overpriced. Why would anybody pay more than they should? I don’t deal with sales people who apply pressure; I just ask for a different salesman or even the sales manager.
If that was the case for Saturn, then by definition the “no haggling” policy was a myth. The idea was supposed to be that the pricing model was different from other lines, and you got a reasonable price without the aggravation. I – and everyone I know – hates buying new cars precisely because of that aggravation.
It’s not a matter of “pressure”, it’s a matter of the reality that the domestic car-buying culture has resulted in the sticker price being a fiction, a number that neither the buyer nor the seller expects anyone to pay. There are lots of ways of estimating a fair price that the dealer ought to be willing to let the car go for under any given set of circumstances, but no way I know to get agreement on such a price without extensive aggravation. In fact part of the strategy of haggling is to get the salesman to invest time and effort in the deal, otherwise he’s more inclined to tell you to take a hike and move on to the next sucker.
The NUMMI plant in Fremont California - now the Tesla plant - was a joint GM/Toyota factory. My neighbor was an HR person there. No legend, but nothing to do with Saturn.
I had a 1993 SL2. (The first year’s models were not as good.) Fantastic and good looking car. When I drove it home the teenage kid next door said cool car, which is quite a mark of endorsement.
Well made too - the frame save my wife’s live after a red light runner hit the car right at the driver side front door. She had physical therapy but did not spend even one night in the hospital. Nothing broken.
Buying the '93 model was a cool event. No haggling, but a lot of attention during the process. A very different kind of car company, especially compared to the cheesy traditional companies I also shopped at. By '97 the dealer (a different one) lost the edge. The styling was more like other cars, and not nearly as cool as the early models.
Tom Peters had a big section on Saturn in “In Search of Excellence.” That was the early days, and shows what they were looking to do.
Same here. Saturn SL2 in 1996, and when that gave its life so that I walked away with only minor bruises from a crash in 2002, I bought another one just like it. When the 2002 SL2 began to have problems last year, I reluctantly traded it in. I would have got another Saturn if such a thing were available, but ended up with a Hyundai.
Maybe the memories are of Honda? They had the first “foreign” auto plant in the USA. That was big news at the time, and I was just a kid. Well, big news here, in Michigan, where at the time the auto industry was the most important thing in the world.