Hope for a Bright Future

As you may or may not know, I am a car buff. I love cars. I don't know how to work on cars very well, but I do love cars. The art, the style, the history, all these are factors to why I love cars. I am also a very red, white, and blue fan, meaning that I am extremely particular to American cars. No other country on earth has produced the kinds of cars that America has produced. Only America has made such icons as the Chevrolet Camaro, the Plymouth Barracuda, the Buick Riviera and the Ford Mustang. Sure, other countries have their cool cars. There's the Ferrari F-355, the Mercedes-Benz SLK 65 AMG (alphabet soup) and the Nissan Skyline, but these don't carry nearly the kind of nostalgia and embodiment of the American Dream like the great American automobile.

Unless you've been hiding under a rock lately, you know that General Motors and Chrysler LLC have requested (and were loaned) money from the government to allow them to restructure and avoid bankruptcy. The key component to this is the restructuring part. I'm not following Chrysler's restructuring plan very closely, but my I am keenly aware of the restructuring going on at GM.

The General's plan for restructuring is basic: trim off the parts that don't make money and capitalize on the parts that do. Good business plan. However, this is not without some sacrifice. It boils down to this: General Motors is letting go of SAAB, Hummer and Saturn. They are also redesigning Pontiac as to be a more enthusiast-only brand with a short product list. I'm not really sad to see SAAB and Hummer go, but I hope that Saturn does not cease to exist. I am a loyal Saturn owner. I have two Saturns each with well north of 100,000 miles on the clock and still ticking. They have had no major problems at all and continue to serve very well. My favorite, a white SL2 called Lizzy, has over 140,000 miles and it has no body rattles and it still fits tight. The thing that makes me passionate about Saturn especially is their history and early committment to America.

Saturn was conceived in the early 1980s as General Motors' clean-slate attempt at fighting the small import cars from Japan. GM already had some small cars, but they were clearly not as good as those offered by the Japanese. So, Saturn was spun off the parent company and given an all-new production facility in Tennessee. The cars they produced (S-Series GM Z-bodies) shared nothing with other GM products (though they looked a bit like 3/4-sized Oldsmobiles). They had a completely different philosophy to the assembly and to customer service than other cars. Saturn made sure that each and every customer felt like part of a family when they purchased a car or had one serviced. Not surprisingly, this won more than a few customers and caused ripple effects in the industry. There was even a time when a batch of S-Series cars were shipped with the wrong type of coolant in the engines. Saturn went to the customers and not only replaced the coolant, but replaced, at no charge, the entire car. They did this with about 1,200 cars.

While I am saddened by the decision by GM to expire Saturn, hopefully, the corporation can leave the parent and rediscover itself as the "Different kind of company." This can be a great time for Saturn. Hopefully, with a little customer support, they can emerge from this as a new American car brand.

Here's a little video I found where Charlie Daniels does part of his music video inside the Spring Hill Saturn Plant.