Saturn was created in 1985 as a response to the success of the Japanese automakers in the United States market, and is a wholly owned subsidiary of GM, and later on became the replacement for Oldsmobile after Oldsmobile was discontinued and scrapped out of pure fiscal reasons. If anyone remembers or knows about the early space program they will know that the Apollo Missions used the Saturn V rockets to make it to the mood – it is for this rocket that the company takes it esteemed name.

Saturn started with 99 people in 1982 that would create the new company, these 99 came from other areas of the automotive industry and were put together to create a new kind and style of company that would be more buyer friendly. Thus they came out with Saturn, and stationed it initially in Tennessee until 2007.

One of the developments from this melding of minds was the first company wide policy of no-haggle amongst the GM owned automobile brands. Following the formation of this policy sales have been strong and vehicles are usually sold at the MSRP price, whilst customer satisfaction ratings remain high, in fact some of the highest in the entire industry. The car manufacturer has also won several awards related to their environmentally friendly policies and their lack of polymer based products for the sides of vehicles, specifically on the paneling on many of their vehicles.

In 2005 the first non-polymer based side-paneled vehicle was the Saturn Relay, a minivan that was recently discontinued for an upcoming redesign in 2008 with even more eco-friendly materials along with much of Saturn’s other Original Stock. So far the products that Saturn manufactures are based on what they called the Z body, a platform with a standard Saturn engine, a 1.9L which was later replaced by other engines by outside sources in 2002. Recently some fiscal issued have plagued Saturn with some vehicles being poor sellers, and thus they had to can both the Ion and the L series.

Here are five things you may not know about the Saturn Car Company:

1. Though the logo of the company depicts the rings of Saturn, the company was actually named after the Saturn rocket which was responsible for transporting American astronauts to the moon during the 1960s and 1970s.
2. The search for the site that would become the primary manufacturing facility for Saturn vehicles was highly public and gained quite a bit of national attention. The facility ended up being built in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Saturns were manufactured in Spring Hill until March of 2007 when production moved to Mexico.
3. Though Saturn was a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors, it didn’t use the same company structure, manufacturing process, or distribution network as every other division of GM. It was started and remains to this day with the goal of having it be relatively independent from the rest of the company.
4. The reason General Motors organized Saturn differently from its other divisions, was so that it could try to copy the quality control and product reliability successes that Japanese automakers were accomplishing at the time.
5. The Saturn Corporation began in 1982 with the assembling of the personnel behind it, was officially established in 1985, manufactured its first automobile in 1990, and reported its first profitable year in 1993.

Saturn came onto the scene fast and proved that they indeed were a different kind of car company. Many buyers embraced their no-haggle sales strategy and loved the fact that they could go to a car dealership and not experience the stress of a high pressured sales force and wondering if they got the best deal possible. Very quickly Saturn developed a good relationship between the company, it’s employees, and it’s customers. Many lessons learned from the implementation of the Saturn Corporation have been used since by other American car manufacturers.