The Rise and Fall of Saturn: How GM's Different Kind of Car Company Failed

Saturn's whole promise was that it was not General Motors, and General Motors was the only company on earth willing to pay for it. In 1985 GM and the United Auto Workers set out to build a small car the American way, in a brand-new plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, with a twenty-eight-page union contract, no-haggle showrooms and dent-resistant plastic doors. By 1994 Saturn was outselling Honda per showroom and tens of thousands of owners drove to Tennessee for a homecoming at the factory. Then the parent that paid for the experiment starved it of new models, folded it back into GM's own parts and plants, and finally shut it down in its own bankruptcy. In this episode: How a GM ultimatum about small cars led Don Ephlin and the Group of 99 to start from a blank sheet Roger Smith, the chairman from Roger and Me, and the company he drove off the line a day before retiring The Spring Hill bidding war, the Phil Donahue governors and a town of a thousand people No-haggle retailers, plastic body panels and Hal Riney's A Different Kind of Company ads The 1994 homecoming and the peak year of two hundred and eighty-six thousand cars Why GM's other divisions and the UAW's leadership turned against the experiment Badge-engineered Saturns, the 2009 bankruptcy and the Penske deal that collapsed in a single afternoon What failed, what survived, and what the Spring Hill plant builds today Subscribe to Mainstreet Memories for more stories of the stores, brands and Main Streets that built America and then disappeared. #Saturn #MainstreetMemories #RiseAndFall #GeneralMotors #SpringHill #SaturnCars #AutoHistory #UAW #BrandsThatDied #90sNostalgia