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By Root 992 0

mistake. I was, he said, just like the forces of tradition in GM, but he wasn’t going to buy it. Everything GM was doing for the future was going to be front-wheel drive. Everything! No exceptions. Well, maybe the Corvette, but other than that, everything! He urged me to change the direction of the Ford Sierra to something more in conformance with his vision of automotive goodness, until I finally had to remind him that neither I nor Ford of Europe were subject to his orders. He gave up and ended the conversation with, “The whole world is going to front-wheel drive. Everybody! The whole industry! You’ll be all alone, and the Sierra will be a flop!” Well, the whole world didn’t, and the Sierra wasn’t, achieving high volumes, market share, and profitability during its extraordinary ten-plusyear life. But Roger’s behavior was disturbingly typical of the GM hubris: if we’re doing it, we do it all the way.We know what’s best, no matter what others are doing. I saw a lot more of that when I returned to GM in 2001.

This encounter was also a manifestation of another culture problem at GM: an exaggerated respect for higher authority, with the acceptance of everything uttered by the CEO and other senior leaders as infallible gospel. Again, this was still in evidence on my return in 2001; by that point, blind obedience to unwise corporate directions had done near-incalculable damage.

Roger Smith was also the initiator of the Saturn brand, essentially an autonomous automobile company within the GM fold. It was to be “different.” This meant a uniquely tailored UAW agreement ensuring more worker participation and a strong union-management partnership.The retail organization was to be different, too. Selected from the best of GM’s vast army of retail outlets, Saturn dealers were awarded large territories to inhibit internecine warfare, were specially trained, and had to agree to abide by the new brand’s guiding principles, which mandated a high level of customer focus, no discounting, no haggling over price, no dishonest practices taking advantage of any customer. This was the best part of the whole Saturn project, and, despite some heroically mediocre cars, there were at one time vast legions of happy Saturn owners, many of whom (somewhat disturbingly) built their lifestyles around their cars. The annual “Saturn Homecoming” festival in Spring Hill, Tennessee, represented the highlight of many social calendars.

Less enlightened was the car itself. In an understandable drive to be “different” (even if not better), management decided that Saturn vehicles would be built with a so-called space frame construction. This involved a sort of welded-together armature of structural panels roughly in the shape of the car, onto which would be bonded composite panels.Thus, Saturns were essentially made of nonstructural plastic glued to a metal armature.

In theory, this solution promised freedom from rust, the absence of parking-lot dings and dents, and easier, cheaper style changes—just switch out the small plastic panels without touching the underlying armature. In practice, however, the plastic panels were finicky. They took longer to produce than conventional stamped steel, and grew and shrank when the temperature changed, requiring the cars to have wide, unappealing gaps around the doors, hood, and trunk for clearance. An effort was made to market the plastic panels, with ads depicting shopping carts bouncing harmlessly off of Saturn doors, but not enough customers placed “plastic” over “steel” in their preference ranking. The engine of the first Saturn was an oddity, too. All-aluminum, it was to be cast to “near net shape,” with a revolutionary “lost-foam” process.The resulting engine was . . . OK! No better, arguably no worse than other GM engines. Just different.

And herein lay the big mistake in the creation of Saturn: in order to preserve its sanctity, it was given its own engineering, manufacturing, legal staff, and so on.This massive structure was to be supported by the sale of just one compact car: the Saturn S1 four-door sedan, which