Bring Saturn Back To Its Roots With the environmental situation as volatile as it is, more emphasis should be put on developing better small cars. Last September, Bob Boruff, Saturn's vice president of manufacturing, lost his fight with cancer.
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Can Detroit Squeeze More Cash From Cars? Back in the 1960s, when Detroit seemed to rule the automotive world, cars were king. They were big. They were powerful. They were stylish. Most important, they were profitable. Then came the Japanese, installing lean-manufacturing systems in non-union plants down South.
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Do You Have Fans or Customers? The closest to the Harley experience was probably what Saturn once had. Back in the days of the SL, you were a "Saturn owner" or you weren’t. It wasn't necessarily a differentiation between the models. If you bought a Saturn, you were de facto part of the club.
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Forbes On Saturn Jerry Flint, a former Forbes senior editior who now writes for Forbes' online venture, takes a look at what he thinks is wrong with Saturn and how the company can be fixed.
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Is There Profit In Small Cars? It doesn't matter whether Farmer Jack makes a penny on every tomato it sells, as long as the grocery chain overall turns a profit. And in theory, it shouldn't matter to GM whether it earns a few bucks on every Chevrolet Cavalier or Saturn coupe. If GM has an effective top-to-bottom business plan relying on earnings from a broad product lineup, that should be good enough.
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Let's Face It: General Motors' Saturn Experiment Has Failed The public is being asked to believe 2005 and the North American International Auto Show in Detroit mark a new beginning for GM's Saturn brand. That's one way to look at it. But it would be more accurate to say Saturn, as it was conceived and operated for its first 15 years, no longer exists. About the only thing that has survived is the name.
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Lost In Space Imagine this: Your business is in trouble, but you come up with a hot product. Any smart businessperson would exploit this success, pump money into the new winner and expand its product lineup. So why is the management of General Motors starving its best success story of the past two decades?
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Roger Smith Was Right When Roger Smith launched Saturn (remember: this was back in the day when NASA rockets were still an event, not something that garners about as much interest as the running of an inter-urban bus system) he said the goal was to be competitive with the Japanese automakers, which were, at that time, kicking the collective assets of the then-Big Three.
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Saturn Workers Should Demand TV Ad Be Pulled In late March, I purchased a new 2000 Saturn SL2. I therefore perked up about a month later when Saturn aired a commercial on national television featuring two cars being driven on a wide open road in an unidentified western state, one by an older male, the other by a younger couple.
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Some Startling Thoughts On The State Of U.S. Auto Market Lying with statistics is not only a universally preferred form of communication -- it's also a lot of fun. For instance: At the rate of market share loss it sustained last year, DaimlerChrysler will be out of business in the United States in 13 years. GM will last about 26 years while Ford's U.S. operations will expire around Labor Day 2040.
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The Death of a GM Dream This was the factory that was going to revive the American automobile industry, proving that Detroit could build quality cars and win back buyers who had defected to the Japanese. Built at a time when auto companies were closing plants and cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs, GM's Saturn plant here was a rare opportunity for the auto company and its workers to leave the industry's old ways behind and embrace some of the lessons that Japan was teaching, with an American twist.
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Why Detroit Is Going to Pieces When Detroit executives a few years ago rolled out the idea of "modular manufacturing," Big Labor only saw jobs going out the door. For a while, unions managed to thwart this approach, in which the assembly of large chunks of cars is farmed out to suppliers. But momentum is building once again, and this time around labor seems willing to budge.
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