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The Curse of the Opel, cont.
The plot to kill Saturn is working. |
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Posted Sunday, April 1, 2001 The new Consumer Reports Annual Auto Issue is out, and the big news, I guess, is the improved reliability of Ford's F-150 pickup, the best-selling vehicle in the country. It's now almost as reliable as its Toyota competitor. The equivalent General Motors pickup, the Silverado (which is the #2 best-seller), does relatively poorly, with 40 percent more defects than average.
But a major off-lead story involves
Saturn, the once-revolutionary G.M.
subsidiary, and its mid-size sedan,
the L-series. Back in 1998, you'll
remember - -OK, you won't remember, so
I'm reminding you -- Slate's "Chatterbox"
speculated that this heavily-advertised
new vehicle was really part of a GM plot
to kill off Saturn, which was guilty of
producing reliable cars that put the rest
of GM's offerings in an embarrassing light.
To carry out their fiendish plan, GM executives
decreed that the L-series would be built at a
tired old plant in Delaware that isn't covered
by the innovative labor agreement prevailing at
Saturn's Spring Hill, Tennessee factory. Worse,
they based the L-series on the Opel Vectra. Chatterbox wrote:
P.S.: One of the few cars worse than the mid-sized Saturn is the Cadillac Catera, also based on an Opel design. It rated 150 percent more defects than average -- a performance so awful that the black bar representing its awfulness would not fit on Consumer Reports' charts. ... Didn't Cadillac win some sort of official Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award a few years ago? So how come none of its cars rates better than "worse than average" in the CR reliability rankings? (One model, the Eldorado is unrated, presumably because so few of them are sold that there's insufficient data on them.) ... New E-mail service: Sign up, using the button below, and you will be notified by e-mail whenever there's a new item on kausfiles.com. [Note: this service is free. You'll be asked a couple of demographic questions; if you find them annoying just leave them unanswered.] 
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