GM to Shut Down Saturn after Sale Fails

General Motors launched the Saturn car brand years ago in an attempt to do things right for a change. Management was streamlined, workers were given shares in exchange for cooperation on the factory floor, and its designs were meant to be showy and practical both. When GM filed for bankruptcy, it entered talks with Penske Automotive to sell Saturn. Those talks have collapsed, and now, Saturn is going the way of the Studebaker, the Nash and the Oldsmobile. It is finished.

As part of the deal they thought was going to happen, GM managers agreed to make Saturns for a couple more years, and then, Penske would get another manufacturer to produce them. Penske announced that an unnamed car maker had said it couldn't deliver Saturns in time to make the transition work. So, GM will kill off Saturn.

The rear-end covering in Michigan began almost immediately, "Today's disappointing news comes at a time when we'd hoped for a successful launch of the Saturn brand into a new chapter," GM's chief executive, Fritz Henderson. said in a statement. "We will be working closely with our dealers to ensure Saturn customers are cared for as we transition them to other GM dealers in the months ahead." It may work out, but it will be a clumsy, half-hearted and half-baked result.

While no one was saying, people who know the deal say the car maker that backed out on Penske was Renault-Nissan (not exactly the top guns in the game anyway). A Penske statement read, "Without that agreement, the company has determined that the risks and uncertainties related to the availability of future products prohibit the company from moving forward with this transaction."

However, one need not feel bad about Saturn dying, as it was doomed from the start according to some. Mark Ritson writing in the Harvard Business Review said, "An even bigger cost for GM was the time it lost building a brand it believed could fight off its Japanese rivals. The notion that another brand, rather than fewer brands, was the way forward turned out to be a colossal distraction." GM essentially wasted 24 years with Saturn, he believes. After GM filed for bankruptcy, it is hard to say he's wrong

© Copyright 2009 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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