Saturn's chief assets within General Motors' portfolio were its warm, welcoming dealerships; attentive customer service, and no-haggle pricing policy.

As of May 2007, Saturn had 433 dealerships across the United States (225 of these were exclusive). Saturn General Manager Jill Lajdziak expected this figure to increase to between 650 and 700 by 2012.

Saturn sales through July 2007 were up 15%, making Saturn the fastest-growing GM brand in that period.


It is fair to say that, in its first fifteen years, Saturn was more about people than product. Saturn provided perhaps the best buying and servicing experience in the industry, but it cars did not set enthusiast fires alight.

True, the first Saturn won the Society of Plastics Engineers' 1991 Automotive Division Grand Award for its innovative thermoplastic exterior door panel. The Saturn was named one the the year's 100 Greatest Achievements in Science by Popular Science, and the magazine conferred its 1991 Design and Engineering Award on Saturn's manufacturing process.

Motorweek gave Saturns Driver's Choice awards for several years running; Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine named them best-in-class several times over. The S-series won IntelliChoice's Best Overall Value award for six years in a row.

All of the above is true, and these are enviable achievements - yet Saturns were not cars that set enthusiasts salivating. The brand was more focused, by GM's on admission, on "customer enthusiasm."

In 2007, the Saturn Vue compact crossover debuted to good reviews, following the Saturn Oulook midsize crossover; Saturn Aura midsize sedan, and Saturn Sky roadster, and just a few months away from the (imported) Astra compact.

It all amounted to an unprecedented degree of new product for GM's import-fighting division, a brand long offering unparalleled customer service, but - as GM Vice Chairman Robert A. Lutz once put it - a brand which had long ignored the other 364 days of the year.

Now, consumers would be encouraged to take another look.


After its newest car, the Aura, launches to rave reviews but disappointing sales, Saturn in January 2007 fires its Goodby Silverstein advertising agency, switching the $190 million annual account to Deutsch.

Its advertising slogan changes. Like Always... like never before becomes Rethink American.

"Don't buy it because it's American," advises a June Aura spot.

"Buy it because it's amazing. Buy it because it turns heads. Buy it because it gets all the little things right. And the big ones too. Buy it for the 5-star crash safety rating and 30 mpg highway fuel economy. Buy it because 49 independent journalists voted, and it's the North American Car of the Year. Over both Honda and Toyota.

"Introducing the award-winning, skeptic-slaying, game-changing Saturn Aura. The sedan that wins on its merits, and nothing else. And what's more American than that?

"Just something to think about."

Saturn in the '90s was known for placing cutaway models on its dealerships' showroom floors to showcase key safety features. In June 2007, Advertising Age reports that GM's import-fighting division will reprise the trick in more modern fashion, using Obscura Digital projection technology to overlay an image of a display model's bones atop the sheetmetal, making the body seem transparent.


At launch in 1990, Saturn has taken great pains to forge a relationship with the people who build its at Spring Hill. As a result, when General Motors is crippled by a UAW strike across North America in the late '90s, Saturn's is the only GM plant in the United States that keeps humming along.

Meanwhile, Saturn's customers are among the happiest in the industry. Saturn is regularly ranked at or near the top of J.D. Power and Associates' Sales Satisfaction Index and Customer Service Index surveys. When Saturn finishes first in the 2002 Customer Service Index, it marks the first time since 1986 that a non-luxury nameplate has done so.

It is no surprise that the Saturn network is chosen to distribute General Motors' EV-1 electric car.

Saturn's no-haggle policy provides fair profit for dealers, who pay their sales consultants fixed salaries. The policy removes sales pressure from the equation.

In 1991, rather than repair them and risk long-term consequences, Saturn replaces 1,836 cars, or refunds their purchase price. The cars have been filled with defective anti-freeze. The company swallows the $18.3 million screw-up.

For a recall in 1997, Saturn sends a notice to owners via FedEx overnight priority letter, with a 20-minute phone card thrown in. Some dealerships, additionally, call their local customers personally. Those who respond to the recall report receiving tokens from the dealership - Saturn Car Care Kits and the like - for their trouble.

In October 1997, when Saturn finds it necessary to roll back prices on its 1998 models, it sends checks for between $300 and $960 to the 14,000 customers who have already bought one.


Rather than being process-oriented, accomplishing its goals through strategies and systems, Saturn is primarily culture-oriented, dealing with internal and external systems through values and philosophy. This makes it difficult for General Motors to pick up what Saturn has done with the retail process and duplicate it across its other brands.

Through the '90s, Saturn is truly unique, and some truly unique stories emerged. Many have heard the one about the driver of a competitor's minivan who stopped at a Saturn dealership to ask for help in retrieving the family's pet iguana from behind the dashboard. A Saturn technician on his lunch break removed the dashboard; saved the iguana, and put the minivan back together.

"We do systematically collect stories and review them for advertising decisions - are adverising is, overwhelmingly, true customer stories," Joe Kennedy, Saturn Vice-President of Sales; Service, and Marketing in that era, told author Vicki Lenz.

"We have on numerous occasions rejected stories for advertising because of our fear that people would not believe them - that they were literally too good to be true" (The Saturn Difference, Vicki Lenz, John Wiley & Sons, 1999).

A collection of submitted Saturn stories can be found at the Saturnalia "Saturn fans" site (@ saturnfans.com/). Suffice to say, the Saturn ownership experience is unique. Saturn owners receive birthday cards for their car in the mail. One Saturn customer confessed to Ward's Auto World in 1999, "I can't wait for the next problem," explaining that her Saturn dealership performed repairs quickly; washed her car, and placed a rose on the front seat.


"Customer enthusiasm" - a favorite phrase of former Saturn president Don Hudler, and rather beyond mere customer satisaction - characterized Saturn. It became customer loyalty, and impressive loyalty it was, given Saturn's limited line of products. There arose a group known as Saturn people: the type who wear T-shirts emblazoned with lines like, if you don't own one, you probably wouldn't understand.

Saturn held homecomings in the last weekends of July 1994 and 1999, when 38,000 and 30,000 customers (respectively) drove - voluntarily - to Spring Hill, Tennessee "to revel in the fact that they own a Saturn," as Ward's Auto World put it ('Going from Apathy to Fascination,' Tim Keenan, Ward's Dealer Business, September 1^st, 1999).

A New York couple got married at the 1999 event. One Saturn customer, writes Vicki Lenz, had tattooed himself with the Saturn logo.


In July 1982, General Motors funds a study to determine how best to compete with Japanese manufacturers that have, since 1973, made market share gains in a decade of two gas crises and tightening emissions regulations. Dubbed Saturn, the project grows into a new division named for the NASA booster rockets that carried Americans to the moon, winning the space race against the USSR.

Born on January 7^th, 1985, Saturn sets about building a complex in Spring Hill, Tennessee, to produce its new car. Unusually, it sets up a Citizen Environmental Council to ensure that the plant is the most environmentally sensitive venture of its kind.

At 10:57am on July 30^th, 1990, Saturn produces its first car to be sold through dealerships that would go out of their way to care for the customer.