Pull the Plug Already! Saturn wheezes on until at least 2012

It’s going to sound cliché, but bear with me. Imagine a company’s finest hope, a scrappy contender with a unique style and inspiring philosophy, poised to take on the complacent and omnipresent foreign thugs. Launched with great fanfare and a lot of optimism, Saturn moved an impressive amount of cars early on. (Let us ignore the fact that they were kind of tinny and, without some really impressive marketing to gather up a loyal fanbase, probably would have shuffled off to oblivion.) They were scrappy, and managed to convey a lot of messages into a rather pedestrian package. But hey, the attitude was there, the hype was there, lots of fans wanted to buy more Saturns, and they wanted to tell all their friends about it.

And … (insert a foreshadowing, dejected look or sound) … GM completely, totally screwed it up.

Talk about resting on your laurels. GM sat on them so long they were implanted in GM’s butt. GM sat on their product (the SL1 and its derivatives) for ELEVEN years with no real significant changes. Dear lord, how can I convey how long that is in car terms? That’s like, everyone starts out as an amoeba in a primordial mud puddle, and while Saturn was waving their flagella around aimlessly, Honda, Toyota, even Hyundai were striding about on land, inventing advanced rockets and string theory. They also formed a club that Saturn wasn’t invited to, and made fun of it. (No Saturns Allowed!)

When someone at GM (I’m imagining a Rip Van Winkle character popping up from a drafting table suddenly, looking around, and crying “oh no! I’ve slept too long!!!!”) finally woke up and wiped the drool from their design table, Saturn was totally screwed. It was too late to catch up by developing their own products, so they started shopping around the GM portfolio and grabbing vehicle platforms from other companies (mostly Opel, GM’s German brand). In doing so, they lost their character completely despite (finally) having good cars in the lineup. With no unique character or philosophy, it was just another GM brand selling a mismatched hodgepodge of cars.

So there has been a lot of speculation about Saturn going the way of the passenger pigeon. Or the marsupial tiger (which were totally RAD, too bad they’re extinct). But anyways, GM has announced that it will linger on in painful agony until at least 2012. Tellingly, they leave it open-ended whether it will survive past that. They might just be buying time to pull the plug.

[Source: Detroit Free Press]