The only thing that GM can do is demonize little cars, because they don't have anything to compete with them.

Saturn had been riding on its initial success for a while and is currently barely ticking over sales.

Alas, what's truly sad is the older Saturns got 36~40MPG and had plenty of power. The newer ones get WORSE gas mileage than the older ones. Saturn used to market their very nifty little cars as being the cheapest 'TCO' (total cost of ownership) of any cars, period. Then GM truly took over and turned Saturn into yet another Pontiac/Chevrolet/etc. They don't even bother to design the cars to be easy to work on anymore. Then they started selling ho-hum 6 cylinder cars that were hardly different from the other dozen brands of heavy, overpowered American cars and trucks, and their cars have just kept getting bigger and thirstier every year.

All that's left of the original Saturn prestige are the plastic body panels (the VUE's whole rear door is metal). What do they have planned? What do they focus all their marketing and research on?

Their bigger cars and the 'Sky' and 'Aura'. All style and marketing, nothing much else to offer.

Saturn IS working on a VUE hybrid, targetting a mere 10% increase in fuel economy on their biggest gas hog! I had a VUE (now I have a Honda HX). The VUE got about 22~25MPG no matter what I did. That's a more than 10% variance just from weather/driving. (The HX got 46.6MPG on its first tank.) The silly people at Saturn even put the generator/motor on the ACCESSORY BELT for their retarded 'hybrid'. Once upon a time, they had seemed to be gradually eliminating the accessory belt. Now they're planning to put a huge power demand... on a belt they were previously trying to eliminate. So, you can pay an additional $5000~7000 to get 27.5MPG and a big battery pack (to wear out), friction operated accessory belt that will have to be (very) routinely replaced, with an oversized alternator/motor/starter on it that wasn't designed for this purpose, and will probably overheat/burn out.

GM should be worried because they have a huge inventory of SUVs and "super size" cars, and precious little on the drawing boards or tooled up for production except gas hogs, and another major oil crunch is looming. How easy will it be to sell a gas guzzler that can't even get 30MPG when gasoline passes $3 this summer, and probably $4 within a year? How about one of those big SUVs that gets (maybe) 14MPG?

So, like the 70's and early 80's, we'll have a lot of undesirable cars made in the U.S. and a lot of imported car brands from lines that have been evoloving for fuel economy for some time, because they're exported to and sold in countries that don't subsidise petroleum prices like the U.S. does.