(FORTUNE Magazine) – You may recall Cynthia Trudell, the superstar GM executive who swept into the top job at Saturn early last year. An old manufacturing hand and the first woman ever to run a major U.S. car operation, Trudell was hailed as Saturn's potential savior. The GM subsidiary's sales were slowing, and it badly needed something new and exciting. Trudell started by launching Saturn's first new line of cars in a decade--a midsized sedan and station wagon that promised to make Saturn sprightly once again.

Only...it didn't. And now Trudell, 47, seems to have an Edsel on her hands. The launch of the midsize L-series has been a fiasco. The model is currently selling at half its projected rate, and Trudell and other GM executives are scrambling to find ways to give the car more sales appeal when they redesign it for the 2002 or 2003 model year. At the same time, sales of the original Saturn car line, the S-series, have continued to slide as buyers turn away from small cars. One result: Trudell recently laid off nearly 500 workers.

Once GM's most valued brand--the different kind of car company inside sclerotic GM--Saturn is now in intensive care. Nobody is putting all the blame on Trudell; many ill-fated L-car decisions were made several years before she came on the scene. But she is being watched. "Her job is on the line," says one GM insider. That's probably an overstatement, given that GM fires executives about as frequently as the Tigers win the World Series. Still, Trudell could find herself reassigned to a less demanding staff job that would effectively derail her career.

That has got to be a bitter prospect for Trudell, who just a year ago was named one of FORTUNE's 50 most powerful women in American business and whose name was bandied about as a possible candidate for a top executive job. Trudell is not accustomed to failure. She is a high achiever, marked as most likely to succeed while still a schoolgirl in eastern Canada. The daughter of a Ford and Chrysler dealer, she got her doctorate in physical chemistry and followed her father into the car business.

Her determination is obvious: She excelled, rising steadily over 19 years in the most macho GM subculture--the noise, grit, and sweat of manufacturing. Thanks to a supportive husband, a high school math teacher who helped care for their two children, Trudell was able to put in long hours on the shop floor and gained a reputation as a manager who could get results without knocking heads. She had been thoroughly tested as a an executive before coming to Saturn, successfully running a big GM operation in England.

So what went wrong at Saturn? When Trudell arrived a year and a half ago, her assignment was clear-cut. Saturn needed to start competing with Honda and Toyota in the midsized market, and it was Trudell's job to make that happen. But right from the start, she found herself in fix-it mode. To save money, the L-series--which had been designed long before Trudell arrived--was based on components developed by GM's Opel, so German parts and processes had to be meshed with American ones as the car was prepared for production. The complexity was magnified when the L-series was lengthened to meet U.S. crash standards and widened to satisfy U.S. customers. So much for the synergies of globalization. Trudell put in lots of hours working out glitches in both the product and the assembly process--"Time is money, and I tend to be assertive in those situations," she says. The first car was sold last July, but the production delays meant that dealers did not receive their full complement of cars until October.

When the cars finally arrived, they sat on showroom floors. And sat some more. The name Saturn was so strongly associated with small cars that people didn't realize the L-cars could be equipped with V-6 engines and were meant to compete head-to-head with the Camry and the Accord. The new car looked the same as the old one, and Saturn's traditionally understated advertising, which was being produced when Trudell joined the company, didn't lessen the confusion. "We underestimated how much the customer sees us as a small-car company," she says. "We were not punching through with the message about the new, larger Saturn."

By September, Trudell realized that L-cars were not selling well. (Saturn will be lucky to sell 100,000 L-cars this year, compared with the 190,000 that Trudell had initially expected.) A month later, to salvage something from the launch, she put in place incentive deals, cutting prices through subsidized leases. By January she had also changed the advertising to position the car more forcefully against competitors.

And the competitors were tough. If there is one big lesson Trudell's learned from this experience, it's not to underestimate the competition. The sales research that she oversaw indicated that the L-series would glide into buyers' garages on the strength of the Saturn brand. Had she looked back 15 years, Trudell says, she would have seen that it generally takes midsized cars much longer to reach their full market potential than Saturn's optimistic forecasts had predicted. "If I had to do it over again," she says, "we would have done a better job of predicting the fragmentation of the market and the strength of the other entrants."

In May, Saturn sold slightly more than 9,000 L-cars, its best month to date, for a total of 35,130 for the first five months of this year. But it wasn't good enough to keep production going full speed. In June, Trudell took the draconian step of permanently eliminating one of two shifts at Saturn's Delaware plant, putting 490 workers on layoff in the midst of the biggest auto sales boom in U.S. history. With the plant operating at half-speed, the car that was introduced with such fanfare is currently losing money. "Cynthia is under fire," says her boss, GM manufacturing czar Don Hackworth. "But she never gives up. She's not a quitter." It has been a rude baptism for Trudell, but she remains at least outwardly confident and determined. "I'm a realist," she says. "This has been a real test and challenge, but I'm not panicking. If everything is running perfectly, people like me get bored quickly." Good thing, because Trudell is getting ready to launch another addition to the Saturn lineup: a new sport-utility vehicle, due to arrive in the fall of 2001.

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