GM Chooses Saturn Site; California Apparently Out
General Motors has finally chosen a site for its much-coveted Saturn plant, but it almost certainly isn’t in California.
Although he would not divulge the location, a GM spokesman said the auto maker has chosen a site and has also selected some alternatives in case the company is unable for some reason to use its first choice.
The spokesman refused to say whether the site is one of three widely rumored to be under consideration: a rural area south of Kalamazoo, Mich.; another rural location in Maury County, Tenn., south of Nashville, or in Shelbyville, Ky., east of Louisville. He termed as “highly speculative” press reports listing those sites as the finalists. GM is expected to announce its Saturn decision sometime this month.
But a top state official said this week that California appears to be out of the running for Saturn, GM’s last-ditch effort to build a domestic subcompact that is competitive with the Japanese in cost and quality. James Vaughn, director of business development for the California Department of Commerce, said it appears that GM will locate Saturn in the Midwest, close to its supplier base.
“We have not heard anything that would indicate that we are a finalist” for Saturn, Vaughn said. “There is no indication that they are looking at the Western United States.”
But he said that GM has not officially told the state that it is out of the running.
Vaughn conceded that state officials knew all along that California didn’t have much of a chance of landing Saturn because GM strongly hinted that it wanted a location in the central United States.
“We knew it was a long shot, but we wanted to send a clear signal to GM that we were interested in projects like this,” Vaughn said. California provided GM with information on about a dozen sites in the state, he added, and Gov. George Deukmejian met once with GM Chairman Roger B. Smith to discuss the state’s chances of winning Saturn when Smith was visiting the GM-Toyota joint-venture plant in Fremont, Calif.
