It’s Official: GM to Build Saturn Plant in Tennessee

General Motors made it official Monday by issuing a formal statement announcing that its Saturn small-car plant will be built in Spring Hill, Tenn., and that Saturn’s headquarters will be located in suburban Detroit.

Monday’s statement came after GM officials informally confirmed last Friday that the Saturn plant would be located in the rural Tennessee town, 30 miles south of Nashville. Friday’s acknowledgement came after Tennessee’s two senators announced earlier in the day that their state had won the intense nationwide competition for the Saturn assembly complex and its 6,000 jobs.

GM is scheduled to have a press conference in Nashville concerning the site selection today.

The auto maker still has to negotiate with local officials in Tennessee on such matters as access roads, education and training for Saturn workers, environmental regulations and the rates for water, sewage and other utilities, said William E. Hoglund, president of Saturn Corp., GM’s newly created small-car subsidiary. GM didn’t say when work will begin on the Spring Hill site, however.

Hoglund said the final go-ahead for the construction of the plant in Spring Hill still depends “on the outcome of discussions with state, local and utility officials.”

GM, which announced in January that it was looking for a site for its Saturn plant, chose Spring Hill over more than 1,000 other locations across the country. GM said Monday that it studied more than 60 factors (which it didn’t identify) in deciding where to build the facility, adding that “Spring Hill offered the best balance of all those factors.”

In an effort to smooth over any hurt feelings in the communities and states that lost in the highly publicized Saturn sweepstakes, GM officials made 300 calls or personal visits Monday to local officials around the country to formally break the news that Spring Hill was the winner.

Hoglund found a silver lining for the losers by noting that, after putting together impressive packages of industrial incentives to woo Saturn, they “will now be better equipped to attract other projects, industries or businesses” to their areas.

Saturn is GM’s all-out attempt to catch up with the imports in small-car production by the end of the decade by using state-of-the-art manufacturing technology and consensus-style management to eliminate the $1,500 to $2,500 cost advantage now enjoyed by the Japanese. Eventually, Saturn, the first new domestic nameplate created by GM since 1918, plans to sell up to 500,000 small cars a year through its own distribution network.

GM said that Saturn’s headquarters will be located in Troy, Mich., a suburb of Detroit, while its engineering staff will be housed in Madison Heights, Mich., another Detroit suburb, providing a total of 1,200 jobs in the Detroit area.

Those staff jobs will be filled both through transfers from within GM and through the creation of new positions, a GM spokesman said.