The Right Stuff

Is this an American auto plant, or a factory from another planet? The company president walks around in a polo shirt with a pocket logo right out of Star Trek, allows workers to call him "Skip" and describes his position as "team member." He and the union boss (who goes by "Dick") have a strange, collegial relationship. As for the rank and file, they don't punch a time clock and they get to handpick the people they work alongside. During off-hours they run around an outdoor obstacle course and engage in group hugging sessions. If they develop a bad attitude, they are paid to spend a day thinking about what's bothering them. That's not all: a TV commercial for this multibillion-dollar venture features an employee's dog, a small blond mutt named Emmett.

Yes, this is an American auto factory, one as far out as its name: Saturn. Situated 35 miles south of Nashville in the small town of Spring Hill, Tenn., the Saturn plant and its 3,000 team members represent a grand experiment in $ American manufacturing. For General Motors, which has invested eight years and $3.5 billion to launch Saturn, the venture has a specific competitive goal: to build small cars as well as the Japanese do -- and then some. But GM's even more heroic mission for Saturn is to help the world's largest industrial company (1989 sales: $126.9 billion) break loose from rusty traditions that have dogged the company's performance for more than two decades.

Most important, as a working laboratory of labor relations and manufacturing know-how, Saturn will help answer one of the most pressing questions of the 1990s: Can America compete with the Japanese? Automaking may be a relatively old field, at least compared with supercomputer building or gene splicing. But the automobile, with its 10,000 parts and ever increasing complexity, remains one of the most challenging products to manufacture and a telling measure of an industrial society's capabilities. "Saturn will have enormous psychological impact on American business," says Lester Thurow, dean of M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management. "If Saturn is successful, it will prove that it's possible to junk the old bureaucracies, change the corporate culture, change the adversarial relationship between union and management, and put it all back together right. If they succeed, it will be a big positive for America. If not, it will be a huge downer."

So far, the results offer hope. This week the first Saturn dealers will open their doors, starting in 30 locations in the West and Southeast and gradually growing to 130 by the end of next year. They will be offering what David E. Davis Jr., the dean of auto critics, has judged "a damned nice little car." That is no small feat. No other American company sells or builds any kind of little car without substantial help from foreign partners. Honda, Toyota, Nissan and other Japanese companies have driven away with that segment of the car business, boosting Japan's overall share of the U.S. auto market from 19.6% in 1980 to 27.7% last year, or 2.7 million vehicles. When Chrysler dropped its U.S.-made Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon models this year, the company began relying strictly on Japanese-built vehicles to fill out the small-car category of its product line. Ford was able to stay in the market only by basing its new Escort and Mercury Tracer cars on a Mazda prototype and by adopting that company's manufacturing technology.