GM's Saturn

When finished my degree at the "West Point of the auto industry," I accepted a position as an brake engineer at the GM Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan, part of a corporate group whose mission was to develop an antilock brake system for deployment on GM vehicles. Competitive antilock systems were already in production at the time (mainly on European luxury cars) and their growing popularity with customers and the threat that the government might require their presence persuaded the management of the affected "component divisions" to enter the market.

From the beginning, our group had an uphill battle with our primary customers, the GM car divisions (which at the time were organized into two, Chevrolet-Pontiac-GM Canada (CPC) and Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac (BOC)). These internal customers harbored considerable skepticism that a homegrown system would be better than proven commercial alternatives. As a result, our group was hard-pressed for clients.

Enter Saturn. In the mid-80's Saturn burst on the auto industry, ballyhooed not only as GM's response to Japanese competition, but as the very face of the auto industry's future. Saturn was to be a different in every way: Labor would work cooperatively with management in a win-win fashion; management itself would be composed of consensus-seeking teams rather than autocratic hierarchies; Saturns would be built in the pleasant greenery of Spring Hill, Tennessee rather than the smoky gray of the industrial north, etc. This very Saturn turned to our group for its ABS.

Suffice it to say that the reality of Saturn never quite measured up to its ideal. During my tenure with GM's ABS group, the "Saturn project" was nothing more than a bureaucratic nightmare. It turned out that one of Saturn's "new ways of doing business" was to attempt to develop rigorous specifications for its components and subsystems. This translated into little more than mountains of paper.

It is with the benefit of this experience, then, that I read reports like this one.