The Saturn plant had the advantage of a greenfield factory site and a motivated workforce, but I don't think that the product was ever as defect-free as the the

The Saturn plant had the advantage of a greenfield factory site and a motivated workforce, but I don't think that the product was ever as defect-free as the the Corollas coming from Fremont-also a GM plant, with a UAW workforce. Pretty close at times, though. ...thing is, the designs for the car, the plant, the tooling, the engines and the transmissions (unique to the Saturn SL1&2, used in no other GM product) the marketing, the dealership subsidies...all cost $12,000,000,000 in today's dollars. Chevy and Pontiac execs were fond of pointing out that the overhead of the Saturn project was so huge, that if GM just described the car to customers, and gave anyone who wanted a Saturn a new Cavalier, GM would actually lose less money than building and selling Saturns. You can buy a shitload of Cavaliers for twelve billion dollars. Of course, the original SL1 and 2 were updated with new-looking plastic interiors and body panels, but the basic car was still the same one that they debuted in 1989 when they stopped selling them in 2003. If it costs you that much to design a new economy car, you can't do it often, so the product goes stale, and fewer people buy it, and it costs more per unit to pay for upgrades etc. GM's inability to make its warring individual states cooperate is a goldmine of WTF moments in business history. Though I lay the Saturn debacle mostly at the Alden-shod feet of the late Roger B. Smith (of Roger & Me fame...)