In the mid-1980s, to respond to the offensive of Japanese manufacturers on the American market, General Motors strategists decided to create the Saturn Corporation.
Also known as Saturn LLC, whose trademark was registered on January 7, 1985, it was an ambitious (and partly premature) project that was supposed to undermine some of the typical pillars of the Detroit big three market.
The project had been studied since June 1982 when Alex C. Mair began work on a compact car, code-named Saturn, based on GM's global spaceframe J platform.
In November 1983, the idea for the new brand and new products was made public by then General Motors president Roger B. Smith and CEO F. James McDonald at the Detroit International Auto Show (NAIAS).
Saturn operated almost independently of parent company GM and marketed itself as a 'different kind of car company' by introducing not only a new brand and a new car, but also a separate dealer network and a pricing structure based on the principle of grant discounts.
The workforce operating a dedicated manufacturing plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, was also independent.
It is interesting to note that Saturn was founded as a private company owned by the employees themselves, but in 1985 it became part of GM.
The product plan was ambitious, but had to clash with development times, market positioning and less than brilliant commercial success.
The first models were the Saturn SC and Saturn SL whose production began in 1990 as the 1991 model year. A Saturn SW was added in 1993.
An SUV and a convertible remained in the plans.
the first sport utility called Vue did not appear until 2001 and the first 'discovery' called Sky arrived only in 2005.
In the following years, while Saturn 'subtracted' resources from the other GM brands (there is talk of 5 billion dollars) and all As the industry faced the economic collapse of 2008, Saturn's development budgets were slashed and its design resources were used for other divisions, most notably Opel.
Saturn gradually lost the originality of its sales proposition and consequently the market lost interest in these 'alternative' models to Japanese cars.
Sales reached their highest level in 1994, with 286,003 vehicles registered.
In 2004, GM and the United Auto Workers union had meanwhile dissolved the single labor contract for the Spring Hill plant, allowing Saturn's operations to be integrated with the rest of GM.
As he had already done for the Pontiac and Oldsmobile brands, then General Motors president Rick Wagoner announced during a press conference in February 2009 that Saturn would be canceled after the end of the planned life cycle for all products (2010-2011).
The separation from this brand would have occurred by closing or selling the division to investors or its own dealers, as part of employee restructuring plans that were expected to receive a second round of government loans.
There was an attempted takeover by Penske Automotive in September 2009, but this clashed with the impossibility of having the cars produced outside of GM.
So just 25 years after its debut, Saturn stopped manufacturing in October 2009 and broke off relationships with dealers, suspending them in October 2010.
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