General Motors stands to lose 25 percent of its hybrid vehicles with the closing of Saturn, but the Detroit automaker doesn’t expect the demise of Saturn to disrupt the company’s next-generation of hybrid vehicle technology.
GM will wind down or sell the Saturn brand by the end of this year, but Saturn’s hybrid technology will live on in at least one of GM’s four core brands – Chevrolet , Buick , GMC or Cadillac . Most notably, the underlying technology of the now-dead 2011 Saturn Vue Plug-in Hybrid is destined for one of the aforementioned brands.
“The technology does not go away. We are going to plug it in,” Tom Stephens, GM’s vice chairman of global product development, told Automotive News.
However, Stephens stopped short of naming which GM vehicle was earmarked for the Vue’s plug-in drivetrain. The Vue shares many of its components with the upcoming Chevrolet Equinox, GMC Terrain and Cadillac SRX, so any of those vehicles would seem like a safe bet.
The Vue’s plug-in technology should surface in 2011 for use in fleets, with a retail version likely to bow soon after.
