Word: saturns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...matter how esoteric the technologies or lofty the management theory, the auto industry reduces ineluctably to a piece of hardware: a car with four wheels, an engine and thousands of little things that make you love it or hate it. For a sneak preview of Saturn, I went to GM's Milford Proving Grounds in suburban Detroit, where officials rolled out all three models: the standard sedan, the high-performance sedan and the sporty coupe. Since this was a secret mission, weeks in advance of the product launch, all traces of the company logo and the brand name were covered...
...engine is both peppy and smooth. The 16-valve, 123-h.p. version of the same engine is downright exciting, particularly with a standard shift, and reportedly has a top speed of 120 m.p.h. The five-speed stick shift runs smoothly through the gears, as does the four-speed automatic. Saturn's suspension is supple enough so that at high speed on a bumpy road, the car was perfectly stable. Some critics have complained about excessive engine noise in the Saturn, but I found it as quiet as any other small car I have driven. The variable-assist power steering, which...
...Saturn officials have said their benchmark is the popular Honda Civic. Does Saturn make the grade? We will have to wait to see if Saturn is as durable, but I have driven the Civic and my impression is that the Saturn's performance, handling and amenities all measure up to its Japanese rival. The Saturns have been designed for easy servicing too, right down to the transparent, easy-to-read fluid reservoirs under the hood and the clearly labeled fuse boxes and dipsticks. Someone at Saturn has been doing a lot of thinking about what the buyer wants, and that...
...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...