Owners Pleased, but Supply Snags Cut Saturn Sales : Autos: A month after the new General Motors car went on sale, fewer than half the vehicles expected were delivered, due to assembly plant problems. It has delayed dealership openings.

Andrew Gibson of Saugus has the good news for Saturn, the new small car from General Motors. Gerald Cohen of Laguna Beach has the bad news.

Gibson, an aircraft mechanic for USAir, says his four-door Saturn is perfect after 2,000 miles. He gets a better-than-expected 42 miles per gallon, and has generated two more Saturn sales by word of mouth.

“Not meaning to sound like a Saturn commercial, but we’re just thrilled,” says Gibson, 28.

Cohen, a businessman, would have bought a Saturn for his wife but none was available. And he would have bought one for his son, but the young man objected to the way the engine sounds. Cohen bought two Honda Accords instead.

“The Honda’s a proven car,” says Cohen.

There is room for debate over the sound of the engine, which Car & Driver magazine described as “sour” but others find unremarkable. And the early verdicts have been favorable on the cars Saturn has managed to build.

But a month after the vehicle went on sale and nearly four months after production began, shortages are costing Saturn customers such as the Cohens and are now causing problems in the dealer network, as well.

Manufacturing snags, late design changes and quality problems with supplier parts continue to halt the assembly line in Spring Hill, Tenn., leaving Saturn with fewer than half the cars it expected to have by now, sources say. Saturn won’t discuss the size of the shortfall or the reasons for it, but admits to a “very low” production rate.

“Some days we don’t build any, some days we build 125 or 150,” a source says, estimating the average at 70 to 80. “It’s a whole range of picayune (problems). We’re doing root-cause analysis, not putting a Band-Aid on it.”

Manufacturing problems are normal on new products, but skeptics say the risks are greatly magnified in the case of Saturn because everything--from the car and its components to the vast manufacturing complex building the engines, transmissions and the vehicle itself--is new.

Officials at Saturn Corp., the subsidiary set up by GM to create what its ads call a “new kind of car company,” have refused all along to divulge interim goals and timetables on the way to its full production target of 240,000 cars a year. The first sales and production results will be disclosed early next month, with the rest of the auto industry’s figures.

But a Saturn spokesman confirmed that the slow start-up has forced Saturn to delay a number of dealership openings. As of this week, 51 dealerships had opened, up from 30 on Oct. 25, the day the cars went on sale. But some have just a few cars and are holding them for test drives.

Several dealers said Saturn has proposed to GM the rare step of establishing an “assurance program” to shore up dealers financially while they wait for cars. Saturn declined comment on this.

Typical is the Saturn franchise in Ft. Worth, Tex., which was supposed to have 90 cars on Oct. 12 but had only a dozen and has since taken delivery of 25 more. Saturn of the Valley, in Sepulveda, expected 150 cars by now, and has received 43.

Selling them isn’t the problem, says owner Bert Boeckmann of the Valley dealership. All but nine are gone and those are needed for test drives. The problem is hanging onto the 97 customers who have placed refundable deposits and are waiting for their cars to arrive.

Company officials are worried about irritating would-be customers and losing momentum if the production rate doesn’t pick up sharply by early next year, when another wave of new dealerships is to open to capitalize on the spring selling season.

Dealer patience “isn’t going to last long,” said a Saturn official. “We’ve created some expectations. By the end of January, we need to have our act together or we could be in trouble.”

Saturn workers, dealers and company officials say the agonizingly slow production rate is all in the name of quality, a claim that seems supported by spot checks with a few early owners of the cars. And so far, those who invested up to $5 million apiece to become Saturn “retailers” are publicly applauding the tortoise-like pace.

“The cars they send us are absolutely flawless,” says Dan Wade, general manager at Saturn of El Cajon. “If they were to speed up production to get rid of the few critics, I think they would be doing the United States a great disservice.”

Wade was referring to some latent America-firsters whom he and other dealers say Saturn has tapped among early shoppers in California. The vehicle, almost entirely a North American product, is aimed directly at traditional import buyers, particularly Californians. Saturn’s goal is for 80% of its cars to be bought by non-GM customers.

To be sure, GM retirees and others with ties to the U.S. auto industry are well represented in the early wave of customers, some dealers say. But several said that half to three-fourths of their buyers owned imports.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, an imported-car hotbed, megadealer Donald Lucas said public interest in the car is “absolutely extraordinary.” He estimates that 70% of the cars he has taken as trade-ins are imports, a far larger proportion than he expected.

“The fact that it’s a domestic is a very powerful positive,” said Lucas, whose three Saturn dealerships add to his Honda, Cadillac, Acura, BMW and Oldsmobile outlets in the Bay Area and Hawaii.

“We repeatedly hear people saying: ‘Boy, it’s about time. We’ve finally built a car that can compete with the Japanese,’ ” Lucas said. “It kind of gives you goose bumps.”

But with the production rate so cautious and so few cars on the road, it is far too early to judge how the Saturn will hold up. Says Lucas: “I sure hope it stays together.”

Perhaps the Saturn with the most mileage is owned by the Detroit Free Press newspaper, which bought one from a Santa Ana dealership in late October and turned it over to a reporter and photographer for an ongoing test drive.

After 5,000 miles, the car has experienced a small leak of transmission fluid from an axle joint, a seat-adjustment problem and a “slight vibration” in the front passenger door when loud music is played. The source of the vibration hasn’t been found, the seat has been fixed, and changes were made in the assembly process to prevent the condition that caused the leak.

Sepulveda dealer Boeckmann, whose Galpin Motors Inc. also includes Ford and Hyundai franchises, says he has delivered 31 Saturns, none of which has been brought back in for adjustments.

“That’s never happened before,” he says.

Actually, that’s not quite right. Aircraft mechanic Gibson said he drove his Saturn back to Boeckmann’s dealership, but only to get some of salesman Hank Collier’s business cards to hand out to the people who are constantly stopping him to ask about the car. His Saturn replaces a Nissan Sentra, he says.

One sales obstacle has been an almost complete lack of Saturns equipped with automatic transmissions--a problem that Saturn officials say resulted from early customer dissatisfaction with “the feel of the shift.” A design change was made, and automatics started reaching dealerships about 10 days ago.

Waiting patiently was Jeff Howard, 35, of Reseda, who traded in a Suzuki and took possession of his loaded, $13,500 Saturn a week ago. National sales manager for Pacific Brands, a supermarket products firm, Howard says he bought into “the whole concept” of Saturn.

By that he meant the ballyhooed worker-management-dealer consensus decision-making at Saturn, the clean-sheet-of-paper approach to the car and all its major parts, the new manufacturing complex far from Detroit, and the car itself.

“It handles beautifully. It’s a tremendous little car,” Howard declares. “I’ve owned just about every kind of import you can think of--BMW, Honda, VW, Suzuki--and I’m proud to say I bought an American car.”

Times researcher Amy Harmon in Detroit contributed to this story.