So Long To Saturn — Its Rings Not Worth A Thing

As The Princess Bride’s Miracle Max would say, Saturn is “mostly dead”. Yesterday GM said Saturn will simply be retired, because after the deal between Penske and GM fell apart, it would take a miracle for anything else to happen.

When the Penske/GM deal for Saturn was announced many months ago, I was a tad surprised. Roger Penske has always had something of a Midas touch turning businesses into cash cows. The buyout of Saturn, however, seemed to be more of a pig than a bounty-producing bovine.

The main problem with the deal was that GM would only continue to build three models—the Aura, Vue and Outlook for Penske through 2011. At that point, Penske would need to find some other corporation to build the cars, which he thought he had (insiders claim it was Renault-Nissan). Unfortunately, that all fell through.

Or maybe it is actually fortunate. The value of a brand producing badge-engineered product lines is precisely the issue I brought up back when Saturn was put on the block. In the old days when a corporation bought out another automaker, it got the brand, one or two production facilities, the trademarks, the equipment, and workers. Now it simply isn’t that easy. Since Saturn produces not one single vehicle unique to its brand, Penske didn’t have the opportunity to buy anything that resembled a true going concern.

It’s obvious that Penske was placing the value on Saturn’s distribution network with which he had longer-range plans. Saturn’s current lineup of vehicles was no doubt a stop-gap until other foreign car lines from China, India and other countries could be imported and sold/serviced via Saturn dealers. Since importing cars is a tricky business, relying heavily on emissions and safety regulatory bodies, Penske needed some breathing room if certain brands needed more time to meet American standards.

I said it before and I’ll say it again – GM killed Saturn a long time ago by stripping its primary value proposition: autonomy. When the brand was introduced nearly twenty years ago, all of the company’s products were unique. If 1990’s Saturn were to have been shopped, it would have found a buyer.

Over the last two decades GM let Saturn lose its value. Initially it was by not replacing the original car models, and then they replaced it with badge-engineered crap. While some would argue that the current lineup of Aura, Outlook, Vue, and Sky are pretty good, there’s no escaping that all the vehicles were available with slightly altered sheet metal (actually, usually it was simply plastic) carrying other brand badges. Penske might as well have been buying the Chevy Malibu as the Saturn Aura!

Sure, there are other reasons people buy dying – or dead and buried, for that matter, automakers. It was popular in the 1980s for entrepreneurs to buy existing parts supplies of automakers leaving the US market…or the entire world, such as was case for companies like Maserati, Checker and DeLorean. Since the parts of Saturn are largely shared with other GM products, it makes this tactic a moot point.

And what about simply buying the Saturn name and brand logo for trademark value sake? C’mon – you’d be hard-pressed to find an automaker with a more ambivalent customer base less likely to buy logo apparel. I suppose Saturn is the modern brand image value equivalent of Essex or Frazer.

So Saturn will soon hit the junk bin. At the very least let’s hope that GM has figured out a better way to close-down a brand more efficiently than when it killed Oldsmobile at a cost of a BILLION dollars.

Tell you what – I’ll make GM stockholders a deal. I’ll buy Saturn…at the invoice price of a new Sky, which is the only Saturn product that (with enough development and bug fixing over a couple generations) I ever thought had any chance of being a really great car.

Come to think of it… GM is going to have to throw in an extended warranty.

Saturn will leave GM’s orbit and then probably fizzle-out

In these uncertain times, there are still those things that can be predicted with 100-percent certainty. One of those is that Saturn will be spinning out of GM’s orbit in the near future.

GM has admitted they want to either “wind down” or sell Saturn. Rumors have been swirling about a deal to sell Saturn to an ownership group led by Black Oak Partners, LLC. We don’t know much at all about Black Oak Partners, but our opinion is that it might as well be the Oak Ridge Boys, because Saturn has little chance of survival on its own.

There was a time and place when a stand-alone Saturn made sense. That time was about 1993 or 1994 when Saturn’s products were unique, and the buzz about the company was that it made great import-fighters.

GM management’s ego, greed, shortsightedness, and general strategic-ADD quickly made Saturn irrelevant. The new company with new products morphed into a young company with a stale product line. Almost fifteen years passed before the division actually received some decent products again. Unfortunately, the products Saturn received were all badge-engineered with other GM products.

So it begs the obvious question: why would anyone – Black Oak Ridge Boys Partners Blues Brothers Band or any of the other rumored “multiple suitors” want to buy a company that only produces products that are nearly identical to other products on the market? Even if Saturn’s offerings are in many ways better than its current platform- mates, that’s still a huge problem. Furthermore, with ultra-high CAFE standards staring manufacturers in the face, an independent Saturn would need some serious deep pockets for R+D.

It’s sad…the Sky roadster could have been a legend. It was prettier than the Solstice and a better size than competition like the Miata. Like all GM vehicles, it needed another generation to work out the cost-induced quality (meaning not-engineered-out) glitches. Similarly, the Aura could have evolved into a great Accord/Camry killer, instead of just an “alternative”.

And imagine had GM been more Johnny-on-the-spot and brought the Volt technology out quicker and put Saturn as the cutting-edge hybrid leader. Instead, if anyone buys Saturn, they’ll need to license the Volt technology from GM, rather than possibly buying the Saturn Volt technology and licensing it back to GM. (Yes, we know GM would have never let it happen, but as they say – “if the price was right!”)

Instead we’ll probably see Black Oak Partners or a bunch of dealers buy Saturn. And just like all the times it happened in the past (remember when Avanti was bought from Studebaker?) the company will quickly fall from relevance, but slowly fizzle out of existence.