The Biggest Product Failure Of All Time: Saturn. 1996 SW1 Wagon

So it's 1996, and GM's Saturn brand sells 226,000 cars, a little less than the brand's peak sales of 286,000 in 1994. Now in the car's 7th model year, a lot of things have already gone wrong. And it's all downhill from here.

The idea of Saturn was that GM was going to finally build a small car good enough to compete with Japanese brands, and, simultaneously, create a revolution in the way GM built and sold cars. The new Saturn factory was a place where management and labor would have a groundbreaking cooperative relationship, and the car would be sold with no-haggle pricing.

So did it all work? Not really.
* GM had promised that Saturn cars would have extraordinary new engines; as good or better than anything ever put in a small car. The reality was that Saturn engines were simple and loud.
* Saturn was selling about half as many cars as GM had hoped. And remember, GM had invested $5 billion (or about $12 billion in 2024 dollars) to make it all happen. Well heck, it should be no trick for the world's largest carmaker to design, build and sell 200,000 inexpensive compact cars. But there's never been another company like GM to burn through insane amounts of money due to its bloated management hierarchies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And like I said, 1996 is when times were comparatively GOOD for Saturn. In a few years, the brand would be gone. So what else happened?
* GM's other six divisions were livid that most of the company's money was being poured into Saturn, and started demanding their fair share.
* GM had originally bragged about Saturn cars receiving frequent updates. In reality it took a decade for anything new to show up. And when the new Saturns were introduced, it was clear that the brand's distinctiveness was over. The larger L-Series introduced in 2000 was built by bolting Saturn's plastic body panels over a car from GM's German Opel brand. And the replacement for the smaller S-Series, the Ion, was also built on a platform shared by GM's other brands. (Also, in 2006 I drove an Ion from Florida to Texas, and was stunned by what a piece of junk it was.)
* By the 2000's, Americans were buying fewer small cars. Bad news for a brand that makes nothing but small cars.
* Soon, all kinds of off-brand (and unwanted) vehicles started showing up in Saturn showrooms. A 7-seater SUV? Sure, what not?

GM's 2009 bankruptcy provided an excuse to put the brand out of its misery. From cubsideclassic.com, "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."

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