PurdueGuy

Depending on how you look at it... to me it seems much more like a brave admission that has since shown to be true. How in the world would you expect Saturn to have made money? Step 1: create an essentially separate company from the ground-up. Build a manufacturing facility capable of 500k+ cars a year. Then start with a small economy car (small profit margin). Step 2: cut off additional funding, expecting this new company to muster up it's own funds to develop not only refreshes of it's existing car, but any additional models it may desire. Step 3: when it's clear that a company with plenty of overhead selling only economy cars can't make enough money to fund new platform development (in spite of selling hordes of what they have), half-heartedly "throw them a bone" with a half-baked, gremin-prone reskin of a car not originally designed for their market (L-Series). Step 4: kill everything that made the brand special & allowed them to sell 250-300k small cars a year to begin with, alienate all customers, complain that the company never made a profit. Honestly, most of the people who hate Saturn have that hatred seated solidly in jealousy, and conveniently ignore the facts of the many ways in which Saturn kicked butt. You guys love to say how the car, or the money that made it, should have been fed into Chevy, or Cadillac, or whatever your favorite brand is. Oh no, GM killed Olds. Now you can't get a Grand Am with a rocketship on it.

Which is a big part of why I consider Saturn (the early Saturn) a success in many ways. They succeeded in having management that was willing to try new things, listen to customers, etc. They had manufacturing with outstanding productivity, quality (defined as consistently building the car correctly, opinions on design quality are another issue), customer satisfaction/buyer loyalty. Heck, they managed to make a profit in '94 with nothing but 3 body styles of one very inexpensive economy car that was built in the US under UAW contract. Many on here like to poo-poo the brand, but that's saying something. IMO, GM should have recognized this success and supplied Saturn with the funds to properly design & build a second model, rather than letting the management in-fighting cut off Saturn and demand they make a profit in spite of having a lot of things stacked against them. While Spring Hill is a terrific facility, Saturn was having to pay for it while not being able to utilize much more than half of what it was built to do. That kind of overhead really hurts a brand's ability to make a profit, on top of the difficulty of making a profit on economy cars. Truly, no car caused the death of Saturn, GM management politics did. If Chevy had a car that was selling 250-300k cars a year, and management refused to supply money for a redesign for 11 years, every one of you would throw an absolute fit. Instead, many of you are fine with it because you hate the brand.

What a great idea! Except that management was so entrenched in their old ways that it would never have been able to happen.

I can understand the sentiment that Pontiac needs to receive unique product, but I have to ask how unique it has to be. This presentation of a theoretical firebird doesn't share body panels, and surely not interior. If it's given drivetrain options different from the Camaro, I personally think that's about as good as we can hope for Pontiac anytime in the anywhere near future. If Pontiac isn't allowed to have any product unless it's on it's own platform (that's the only way to really avoid the "rebadge" comments), then you might as well shut the brand down now. It would be nice to see Pontiac get some cars that are hard to tell they're using the same basic platform as another GM car someday, but some of you will whine & moan if it doesn't happen yesterday, and it'd better not cost too much, and there had better be a refresh after 3 years, and... blah blah blah. Might as well kill Pontiac now, GM can't afford to operate the brand in a way to keep even the fans from being cynical.

I wouldn't say "very" similar. Saying similar is stretching it. The Solstice wraps around the right side of the driver. That is similar. However, this car's interior wraps around both sides of both occupants, like side-by-side bobsleds. I first recalled the Aurora interior when I saw it, which is similar for similar reasons: But they pulled this off without it feeling at all "chunky". Depending on who's inside, I could see it seeming either incredibly sporty/awesome, or claustrophobic. I find it to be an awesome look.

The front end looks higher than the back end. Terrible.

I'll vote tie between the L-Series and Ion. The L was an underwhelming car, and then proved to have issues on top of that (electronics, 3.0L engine issues). Where it should have been a product to move Saturn into more than just the small car market, something Saturn needed to move toward possibly being profitable (better margins), it was essentially a failure. But where the L-Series seemed to add insult to the injury of the long-in-the-tooth S-Series, the Ion added both insult and injury on top of both. While the drivetrain was solid, and the quadcoupe design a unique plus, the styling and interior turned off a lot of people, as did the drop in fuel economy compared to the S-Series. The result was sales that were a fraction of the S-Series. So while the L-Series failed to help Saturn when it really needed it, the Ion caused a real blow to Saturn's core product - small cars. I'll call it a tie.

that's actually pretty danged HOT. And if Pontiac is going to be truely made into a performance niche, a car like this is very fitting.

gas guzzlers are very affordable right now, new and used.

glad the escorts I'm helping a friend with are red...

With polymer panels, you don't have to worry about whether it'll buff out!

Very cool - build it!

Looks pretty good, I couldn't blame someone for buying one. Now hurry up with the NG Corsa & bring it here, GM!

The current aveo does look more mature... and by that, I mean boring. If they'd made it a 3 door, I would have probably considered one sometime to buy & modify. The 5dr design pretty much killed the appeal, making it look less like a full cabin go-kart, and more like a lame economy car.

Clearly Nissan is in more than just the auto business, but also has a hand in the financial business.

looking past the lines they added to make it dramatic, it looks better than the average KIA, but really only par for the segment anymore. Good, not great.

I win, cuz I tune a Saturn. There's no aftermarket for me to lose! HA!

I'm glad I live in a neighborhood where no one's telling me what I can and can't do with my own property. That said, it's still a nice neighborhood.

GM needs to continue to learn how to do Lean Manufacturing better. A part of that is knowing how to do low-volume, high-profit margin vehicles. The 'vette is the perfect car to continue to learn those things on. It also greatly helps Chevy & GM's image, and killing it would just greatly increase the number of people who are apathetic at best about the fate of Chevy & GM.

Add to that that the twin towers were basically giant file cabinets, so there was plenty of paper fuel as well (doesn't burn as hot as the jet fuel, but it still adds to the overall burn.)

Looks great.

They have done tests to simulate airplanes flying into nuclear plant core buildings, and it barely scratched the concrete. Aluminum isn't particularly strong, especially when it's been made as thin as possible while still being able to function as an airplane. The problem that would come from a terrorist flying a plane into a nuclear plant is if it flew it into an office building or something and killed people, which is just like flying it into any other office building, except the uneducated general public would panic and think the world is going to end, just like when three mile island proved the safety systems work, but everyone paniced and thought it was a huge catastrophy, even though no one was even injured, and it didn't release any notable amount of radiation. ------------ Climate change may be good theory, but do you honestly think we know enough about how the world (nay, the solar system) works to determine if our pollution's contribution to it is more than a pinprick? It may or may not be, but we have such a sub-rudamentary understanding of the system that it's unwise IMO to panic and/or make major policy decisions based on it. It is far more wise to be reducing pollution and dependancy on foreign oil for measurable reasons, and continue to study the environmental systems & gain a better understanding.

The quality of the data from the past, and just how far back the data needs to go to be relevant IS in question. A good conclusion from bad or inadequate data will still give a bad result.

Except half of what you posted is not facts, it's taking some data (often an unstated timeframe of data from a specific region) and then pretending that the climate will act in a linear fashion over the next 20, 30, 50 years as predicted by that likely small subset of years worth of data. That's bad science. Predictions ARE NOT FACTS. I agree with Teh Ricer Civic! that we should be reducing pollution & moving on to alternative fuels for measurable reasons like clean air and reducing our dependency on foreign oil, not on a political agenda being built on the poorly understood platform of global warming / climate change. Science (with careful guards to kick the politicians out of the process) needs to continue to understand climate, monitor it, and try to understand in what ways we do and do not affect it, but it doesn't take a genius to see that we only have a preschool-level understanding of how our world & climate work, and that isn't something worth basing panic and major policy change on.

There is already a race to see which company can build the first new nuclear reactor under a new consolidated contruction/operating licensing method by the NRC. There are nearly a hundred new reactors being planned (granted, not all of them will come to fruition, but there is a LOT of interest by power companies to get new nuclear plants built.)