Spring Hill: The Saturn Experiment

In nineteen eighty-five, Spring Hill was a small Tennessee farm town. Then General Motors chose it as the home for Saturn, its bold attempt to build a completely different kind of American car company. Tennessee officials had courted the plant, and construction began almost immediately.

The first Saturn rolled off the line on July thirtieth, nineteen ninety. The plant was designed around worker autonomy: self-directed teams controlled their own scheduling and quality, with no-haggle pricing at dealerships. Spring Hill built Saturn vehicles for nearly two decades.

When Saturn was discontinued in two thousand ten during GM's bankruptcy restructuring, it ended one of American industry's most ambitious social experiments. The plant today builds Chevrolet and GMC vehicles, and Spring Hill has grown to more than fifty thousand residents.