Tag: tesla

The rise and demise of GM’s Saturn

Not very long ago, on a cold, wintry day of January 1985 the top man at GM, Roger B. Smith, unveiled ‘Saturn’, the first new brand to come out of GM in almost seven decades. A stand-alone subsidiary of GM, Saturn had a promising birth and was touted as a ‘different’ type of a car. Having its own assembly plant, unique models and separate retailer network, Saturn operated independently from its parent company. It was a cut above the rest in using innovative technology and involving its employees in the decision making process. Conceived as a fighter brand to take on the Japanese brands, the small car of superior quality was the product of strong principles with a mission of being America’s panacea to Japan’s challenge. It reaffirmed the strength of American technology, ingenuity and productivity with the combination of advanced technology and latest approaches to management.

Though a revolutionary idea, Saturn wasn’t able to live up to the hype or the hopes of Roger Smith. The case of Saturn is definitely one for the books. Its marketing campaign fired up the public’s imagination and interest perfectly while the product was a miserable failure. Everything the company did was just another leaf out of the handbook of perfect PR. When the first lot of cars had a bad engine antifreeze, the company replaced the entire car instead of just the coolant much to the customer’s delight.

Besides clever marketing, Saturn’s biggest assets were its passionate employees and customer-centric approach which rewarded it with a quick victory. The victory was however short-lived as GM was reluctant to expand Saturn’s offerings for fear of cannibalization on the sales of its other divisions. For the existing models, Saturn’s engine had inferior motor mounts with the plastic dashboard panels giving it a cheap look and even the plastic-polymer doors, the so-called unique feature, failed to fit properly. Overall, the car neither had an identity nor a USP. To make things worse, Roger Smith was on a spending spree from throwing recall parties when vehicle problems were solved to hosting “homecoming” celebrations at plants. This saddled GM with high costs leading to increased doubts of Saturn’s survival among the leaders of GM.

Disaster struck further when Saturn’s sub-compact prices failed to cover the huge costs gobbled up by a dedicated plant with massive operating costs. The fact that the plant churned out cars that barely share any common parts with other GM brands did not seem to help at all. To top it all, at a time when buyers were snapping up minivans and SUVs, Saturn’s offerings were just limited to 3 small models for over a decade, thereby losing out on locking customers in. Just when GM was pondering over the decision of scrapping the car, the UAW visited one of Saturn’s production facility with its international contract, only to be rejected by the workers. As obvious as it seemed, the unique labor contract of the company was dissolved and GM had no choice but to part with the brand by dividing the production among other GM plants.

Automotive history has witnessed myriad failure stories of brands that were supposed to be world-class products but ended up biting the dust. One such underachiever brand was Vector which sprouted out of the aim of producing an American supercar but doomed due to cash flow issues, mismanagement and failing to keep up their insane promises. Sterling, Rover’s disguise into the American market, was another lost car of the 80s which most people haven’t even heard of. Their promise of delivering “Japanese reliability and refinement with traditional British luxury and class” couldn’t save them from continuous sales drop and combating competition from new Japan rivals. Few other epic automotive experimental failures which can be recalled in this scenario would include Chrysler’s TC by Maserati , Subaru SVX, Jaguar X-type, Lincoln blackwood, GMC Envoy XUV, Chevrolet SSR, Chrysler Crossfire and Dodge Durango Hybrid/Chrysler Aspen Hybrid. While some were design disasters, the others just couldn’t perform.

The automobile industry is governed by various factors which include the technology advancements of the time, economic conditions and fluctuations of consumer needs. The latest automotive chip on the block are the electric cars which are set to revolutionize the entire industry. LeEco, a Chinese electronics company is taking serious steps to target Tesla, what with it investing $1.08 billion on developing its debut electric car. Tesla was the name which paved the way for an electronic vehicle era. Whether LeSEE, LeEco’s concept sedan, can surpass Tesla’s performance and give them a run for their money is only something that time will tell. If successful, these electric cars could be the game changers of this century to usher in an electric future. If not, it will fade away and claim its place as a bittersweet memory on the list of flops that the industry has had.

Some eponymies in science

In history, it is rare that scientist achieve notoriety and fame during their lifetimes. If they nonetheless do, they get credit and lasting recognition by having a scientific discovery named after them.

However, there happen to be wrong naming attributions. Indeed, naming disputes are so common that there is even a rule of thumb called the Zeroth theorem, which states that eponymous discoveries are, more often than not, wrongly attributed. Appropriately enough, the theorem is also known as Stigler’s law of eponymy even though it was originally formulated by Robert Merton.

Below are few examples.

Antonio Meucci – who despite developing the first telephone spent his whole life in poverty (“if Meucci had been able to pay the $10 fee to maintain the caveat after 1874, no patent could have been issued to Bell”), while Alexander Graham Bell got all the glory.

Alan Turing – whose huge strides in the conception of the first generation of computers (his work for the Colossus computer, the world’s first programmable digital electronic computer) were destined to never to be fully attributed to him, due to his untimely death.

Nikola Tesla – who died almost totally penniless, while the ideas he had put forward for radio (he demonstrated a wireless communication – radio – in 1894) made Guglielmo Marconi (who received Nobel Prize in Physics for radio in 1909) a fortune.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck – who correctly surmised that living things evolved, over sixty years before Charles Darwin publicized the fact, but was to die in ignominy with his ideas not appreciated (but tacitly considered by Darwin in his On Origin Of Species).

Geoffrey Dummer – whose musings on the development of the integrated circuit preceded those of Bob Noyce and Jack Kilby by almost a decade, but due to lack of vision by the British Government his plans were never to make it off the drawing board.

Joseph Swan – who despite having the technical expertise that allowed him to design the first workable electric light bulb, was no match for the commercial machinations of adversary Thomas Edison.

Johann Loschmidt – an Austrian scientist who calculated in 1865 the number of molecules in a mole but it was Italian chemist Amedeo Avogadro, whose name became associated with the number.

Albert Neisser – who discovered leprosy (officially known as Hansen’s disease, in honour of the Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen, who discovered the bacterium responsible but did not manage to cultivate it, or show that it was truly linked to leprosy), and who obtained from Hansen a large set of samples from people with leprosy. Neisser succeeded in staining the bacterium and, in 1880, announced that he had discovered the cause of leprosy. Hansen wrote a lengthy article about his own research for a conference on leprosy, which credited him, not Niesser, for the discovery.

Robert Hooke – Who postulated, amongst other things, the true nature of planetary motion, only to witness his rival Isaac Newton take all the praise for it.

Sources: New Scientist, ECNmag