[bkskatersd]

Moving Saturn products to Pontiac and eliminating the division would be a catastrophic mistake, and GM knows this hence the reason Saturn is not on the chopping block. Saturn customers are not going to switch to Pontiac or Chevrolet, but instead will go back to Toyota, Honda and Nissan. Surveys of the customer base of Saturn has shown that the vast majority customers previously purchased Japanese brand cars and would not consider another GM brand. The brand has done what it was intended to do, win customers to GM who would never consider buying a GM car. This despite GM's neglect of the brand and the small dealer network.

The fact is the Pontiac/Buick/GMC network is immense yet is not producing results. The Saturn dealer network while smaller is selling more cars per dealer than most other GM dealerships. This smaller network has managed to sell more cars than Buick, Cadillac, Hummer and Saab. From a total sales standpoint, it is the number 4 selling brand of GM's 8 divisions. Interestingly, according to a Wall Street Journal article several months ago, Saturn sells more cars into the retail market than Pontiac. Also in that same article it stated that are Buick dealers that sells only 15 cars per month and have to make there money off of service and used cars. The problem for Saturn is that it's dealer network is not large enough to really grow the brand from it's number 4 spot. The only way to aggressively grow the brand is to enlarge its dealer network, something GM has yet to do.

Maybe it is time for GM to look at converting underperforming Buick dealers in areas where Saturn has little sales penetration to Saturn dealers to help grow the Saturn brand. Of course, they could do as the author suggest and eliminate Saturn altogether thereby sending 240,000 customers per year to Toyota, Nissan and Honda.