And another one bites the dust. Looking in today’s Washington Times I read the news that Saturn (the car maker, not the planet) will soon be no more. William Ehart’s first line pithily says it all:
It may have been a different kind of company making a different kind of car, but it is screeching to a familiar halt.
Saturn goes the way of Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Plymouth as domestic car lines extinguished in the last few years after a fair amount of history, as the deal reached with Penske Automotive Group to distribute Saturns fell through because Penske couldn’t convince another manufacturer to adopt the Saturn brand.
The fate of Saturn has interested me because I used to be a Saturn owner and found my sedan to be a reliable, if somewhat dowdy, automobile. When they first came out in the early 1990’s their styling was unique in a business which tends to be a copycat one, and the brand was originally one of GM’s more reliable products.
But as time went on Saturn started to more and more resemble the remainder of GM’s line and eventually the nameplate lost its quirky appeal. They also suffered to some extent from having a smaller dealer network than most other brands, as the company tried to present an upscale buying experience at bargain prices. And just as owners of the other three nameplates mentioned have found, Saturn owners will now have to put up with the vagaries of owning (and eventually trying to sell) a car with an “orphan” nameplate, which in many cases will hurt resale value.
On a more local level, the Salisbury area is now stuck for sure with another (literal) white elephant of a building as the former Saturn of Salisbury dealership lies empty along U.S. 13. We’ve already lost those jobs, but the Ehart story notes 13,000 more workers could be affected by the closing of 371 Saturn dealerships.
Perhaps the GM tree was ripe for pruning, but has anyone else noticed that American auto manufacturers seem to be retreating at a time when the worldwide automotive market continues to expand? I can see the Progressive Delmarva crowd telling me that this is because other worldwide carmakers are into creating glorified lawnmowers, but my counter is that auto companies figure out that the larger cars create the higher profit margins and eventually these newcomers will get to that point. Remember, the Japanese carmakers started out making econoboxes to enter the American market but eventually came out with the same trucks and SUVs environmentalists love to hate. (That and Priuses are butt-ugly both in styling and overall environmental impact.)
It was the market that got American automakers in trouble because their products weren’t able to compete with the imported brands – overseas automakers could create a equal or better car for less because their manufacturing processes were more flexible (that and they weren’t paying out the nose for retirees’ health care.) Even with the federal government stepping in yet again to bail out two of the Big Three, the core problems still remain and junking Saturn isn’t going to make nearly as much difference for GM as junking their onerous UAW contracts would.
