could penske’s purchase of saturn fundamentally change the auto industry?
Roger Penske is purchasing Saturn and the implications are possibly far reaching. If a crisis, as the saying goes, is a terrible thing to waste then the auto industry circa 2009 presents a golden opportunity to see how a crisis opens opportunities to re-write the rules that govern an industry. Penske’s gambit aims to do that and if he succeeds it could fundamentally change the way cars are designed and manufactured. Saturn has been cast in the role of change agent before. The company was conceived in 1982 as a “new kind of car company, making a new kind of car.” Back then, the rap on the American car industry was that it produced poor quality goods. That problem, in turn, was blamed on ossified relationships between the car companies and their “stakeholders”: relationships with the unions had become paralyzingly adversarial, relationships with suppliers were dictatorial, the companies’ own designers weren’t cooperating across divisional boundaries and the dealer network were unwieldy.
