Big guns trained on Saturn
Telesto Ventures, the group backed by Oklahoma City-based Black Oak Partners LLC and several Saturn dealers, is considered one of the finalists in the competition (and who expected competition?) to acquire the Saturn brand from fading General Motors.
When I first mentioned the group, I said something to this effect:
Unlike this earlier proposal, the Black Oak group would not hook up with one existing manufacturer as sole source: Saturn 2.0 would maintain a design team, which would then work with outside automakers to tailor appropriate models accordingly.
Said design team has now been revealed to include one certified heavy hitter: Tom Gale, once nominated for Car Designer of the Century for his Dodge Viper, the force behind both Chrysler’s famed LH “cab-forward” sedans in the 1990s and the rear-drive LX platform (300C) that replaced them.
Telesto, in fact, seems to have become the place for Chrysler exiles:
The Telesto Ventures team also includes Ted Cunningham, Chrysler’s former sales chief, who also worked for DaimlerChrysler AG after the 1998 tie-up with DaimlerChrysler, and Susan Unger, another past Chrysler executive, who worked as DaimlerChrysler’s chief information officer and as a senior vice president.
[Steve] Torok, who was in charge of [Mitsubishi's] business outside Japan, including its unprofitable U.S. unit, resigned in early 2004. He previously served as vice-president of sales and marketing integration and strategic planning for DaimlerChrysler.
Inasmuch as none of these folks had any particular responsibility for the Chrysler Chrysis that led the company into a heavily-rewritten Chapter 11, there’s at least a reasonable chance that sanity might prevail at Saturn 2.0, should this deal come to fruition.
