Spring Hill Is Shining Example Of GM

The Car Connection reports: Saturn’s Spring Hill Era Ending? Man, we remember when this opened and how Saturn was different (way before Apple made thinking differently cool) and how this manufacturing plant was different, too.

But GM's weak-ass planning has made this plant redundant. In four months there will be no cars to make.

GM spokesman Dan Flores acknowledged last week that the string of decisions by GM's board and product and production planners will leave the Spring Hill plant vacant next year, depending on what point GM decides to halt production of the current generation of the Vue.

Flores, however, said the decision to kill the minivan project doesn't mean that Spring Hill plant is doomed to shut permanently. The plant is still in the running for other future products. However, executives from GM's Asia Pacific Group said recently that a new small car and a new small pickup truck that GM now has in development will be built outside the United States.

We bet GM closes the plant. This whole thing is upsetting us because it was a time when, naive as we may have been, we believed this really was a different way of looking at the automotive world. Saturn was supposed to be sorta autonomous, the plant more work-centric, and Saturn wholly American and we thought it would work. And shutting this plant says, to us, that dream is over.

It sure woulda been cool if the Saturn Aura, pictured, was built in the Spring Hill plant.

Comments

[salguod]

I feel the same way. I thought the original Saturn concept was great (I had a 1992 SL2). When they first came out, they were the closest thing the General ever made to an import fighter. Had the updated the product like the Japanese (every 4 years) instead of once a decade or so and had GM management kept their hands off and let the Saturn team have a real go at it, it may have worked. But after the initial success, it seems like all the GM bigwigs wanted to get involved to take credit, and things spiraled down quickly.

The early Saturn was poised to change the industry from the union contracts to the dealer network. Unfortunately they're just another GM division now. Once the Vue is dead, they won't even be plastic anymore. Like putting a Saab key in the dash or stamping a 'Vette out of steel in my opinion.

Sigh.