Word: saturne
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...this is an American auto factory, one as far out as its name: Saturn. Situated 35 miles south of Nashville in the small town of Spring Hill, Tenn., the Saturn plant and its 3,000 team members represent a grand experiment in $ American manufacturing. For General Motors, which has invested eight years and $3.5 billion to launch Saturn, the venture has a specific competitive goal: to build small cars as well as the Japanese do -- and then some. But GM's even more heroic mission for Saturn is to help the world's largest industrial company (1989 sales: $126.9 billion...
Most important, as a working laboratory of labor relations and manufacturing know-how, Saturn will help answer one of the most pressing questions of the 1990s: Can America compete with the Japanese? Automaking may be a relatively old field, at least compared with supercomputer building or gene splicing. But the automobile, with its 10,000 parts and ever increasing complexity, remains one of the most challenging products to manufacture and a telling measure of an industrial society's capabilities. "Saturn will have enormous psychological impact on American business," says Lester Thurow, dean of M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management...
...results offer hope. This week the first Saturn dealers will open their doors, starting in 30 locations in the West and Southeast and gradually growing to 130 by the end of next year. They will be offering what David E. Davis Jr., the dean of auto critics, has judged "a damned nice little car." That is no small feat. No other American company sells or builds any kind of little car without substantial help from foreign partners. Honda, Toyota, Nissan and other Japanese companies have driven away with that segment of the car business, boosting Japan's overall share...
...interior design and solid workmanship. "A major step forward for General Motors," said Road & Track, while Motor Trend lauded the sports coupe as "a remarkable feat for the home team . . . something to be proud of." Even so, some critics complained about excessive wind noise and the raucous sound of Saturn's engine at high r.p.m., which Car and Driver described as "a chorus of Osterizers." Other critics found Saturn's styling to be too similar to other GM models...
Most experts conclude that Saturn ranks with its Japanese competitors as a noble contender -- if not yet a knockout champion. What cannot be known for sure at this point is probably the most important single factor: Saturn's reliability. In that department, the company is taking no chances. Only 1,000 Saturns will be ready for sale this week, about half the number expected, because the plant has slowed down its production to iron out any initial bugs. "We've had to do some tweaking," a Saturn official explained. Once rolling, Saturn aims to boost production...