Today’s fine CC on the 1960 Ford (recommend to read it first) isn’t totally complete without a quick look at the 1960 Edsel, one of the more embarrassing moments in automotive badge-engineering history. The full Edsel story will await another day (and a 1958 model), but lets just say this last-ditch effort to keep the Edsel brand alive by slapping a different grille and vertical taillights on the 1960 Ford, and drastically de-contenting it was such a disaster, it was pulled from the market within months of its arrival.
The Edsel’s vertical taillights were highly incongruous in that very horizontal rear end. Those taillights were shared with the 1960 Comet, which was to have originally been an Edsel compact.
Curiously, the 1960 Edsel did have one unique model, a four door hardtop that had the Fairlane sedan roof line but without the pillar and window frames. Hardly enough to help. 1960 Edsel brochures are full of references to “thrifty” and “budget wise”. Maybe Ford was subconsciously expressing its own financial smarting from the Edsel fiasco.
As a kid, I was very aware of the distinctive ’58 and ’59 Edsel, but the first time I saw a 1960, I assumed it was a Canadian model of some sort, like so many of the curious make-up jobs Detroit cobbled up north of the border.
I’ve always loved Edsel’s eye for design. The 59 hardtop coupe is definitely high on my list of dream cars.
I think the only reason any 1960 Edsels were built was that the decision to pull the brand wasn’t made until after parts had been made, and they needed some time for an orderly shutdown anyway. Just a guess on my part.
I agree, they were totally badge-engineered. How was that different from the 1958 or 1959 Edsels?
Preview of Mercury from about 1978 (when the last Grand Marquis was built on a “different than a Crown Victoria wheelbase”) till the death of the brand.
Wow. What a train wreck!
This is deadly sin territory…flagrant badge engineering, unappealing design and the Edsel brand all wrapped up in one hideous package.
This car has always fascinated me. It is sort of what Mercury had always been and would soon be again. I once read that as soon as Edsel came out, Ford started scootching up in price and Mercury started bleeding down, and basically crowded Edsel out of the lineup.
It was as though Mercury tried to move upmarket, failed completely, then looked back at another car in its old bed. Edsel got kicked out of bed (and out of the house) and Mercury got its old room back.
This may actually be one of the better looking 1960 cars. It is downright modern next to the really wierd Dodges (and a lot more attractive than the 1960 Mercury).
Why does nobody just stop at the end of the model year? Partial last years for Edsel, Studebaker, DeSoto.
Studebaker’s last year was an unusual circumstance. The Canadian line was running on a shoestring; no real product development or engineering. A couple of engineers were hanging around to try and find the best off-the-shelf parts from suppliers and other companies…the GM-McKinnon engines were selected over Ford engines simply because they fit between the shock towers on the single model.
During the 1965 model year, Canadian plant manager, Gordon Grundy, who was really the only manager left concerning himself with auto production, went to the board asking for a campaign to recruit more dealers. He was viciously rebuffed by Studebaker Chairman Byers Burlingame in that existing dealers were not selling vehicles, averaging one-to-two sales per dealer per month.
Shortly thereafter, Grundy had asked the board for a very small amount of money to refresh the rear styling of the vehicle for the 1967 model run. The board instead informed him that there would not be any 1967 models and to begin closing procedures immediately.
Apparently the decision of WHEN to close was done at that particular moment, although it’s obvious in hindsight that Studebaker had been working toward an exit for four years and longer. Apparently the chosen time was picked in rebuff to Grundy’s bothering the board for more money and resources; although up until that time, I’ve read, it was likely Studebaker’s strategy to keep one model in production to prevent legal problems in terminating dealer franchises.
Why Edsel closed, was pretty obvious. They weren’t selling; and McNamara was fully in charge. Once he had the excuse, with the first-quarter sales in…he pulled the trigger.
I read once that the reason Studebaker went with the Chevy engines was that Checker had already developed an adapter to mate them to the old Borg-Warner automatic that Studebaker was also using.
I think Ford was taken aback by how badly the 1960 Edsel actually did. By the time it went on sale, it was basically an interim model, intended to keep Edsel dealers going until the compact Edsel B (the Comet) was ready. However, a lot of dealers didn’t bother even ordering the big Edsel, so Ford was left with a large stockpile. Ford pulled the plug, and the Edsel Comet became just plain Comet, sold through L-M dealers. (It wasn’t technically a Mercury until I think 1962.)
The Edsel was a disaster, no question. Starting with the name…and then to the styling…and aimed at an undefined market that wasn’t even proven to exist. The repugnant front styling; the mishmash of Ford and Mercury bodies and parts, all done on existing Ford/Mercury lines.
Then, the chaos in the Executive Suite, as McNamara was consolidating control. Ford was reorganizing; Hank the Deuce was acting as President with Ernest Breech as advisor and tutor. McNamara was named President in 1960…but he was a power in the years up to it, and he was open about his plans to kill the Edsel.
It was the previous management team, the Breech team, which pushed the Edsel; and they were on the way out. McNamara, a cold fish who didn’t understand the auto business, wanted “rationalization” – and the Edsel’s very existence was not rational.
With the chaos, the lack of infrastructure, the lack of clear vision and a new power-group totally opposed to the entire project, it could not help but fail. And fail it did…the true victims here, even more then the customers, were the businessmen who bought Edsel franchises. Imagine, laying out that money, to have a clunker of a car under that white sheet on the much-ballyhooed Introduction…and then not even have the parent organization support it, or listen, and then kill it two years later.
The whole thing is testament to Henry Ford II’s mercurial temperment and dark whimsey. The chaos in the board room was the result of his playing the GM-Breech team against the Whiz Kids; and the violent jerking of the corporation one direction and then another, cost other people large amounts of money. Henry had inherited the business; had managed to keep control as it went public; and at least didn’t destroy it…but like his grandfather, he seemed at times almost to have a death wish for the business. He certainly didn’t care about the long-term effects of his whims.
I agree that Henry Ford II’s temperment, and his delight in playing executives against each other, hurt Ford in the long run. But I can’t agree that Robert McNamara didn’t have any feel for the automobile business.
He is usually blamed for killing the two-seat Thunderbird, but what people forget is that he wasn’t the only one at Ford who wanted to do this, and he championed the four-seat model. There was a faction at Ford that wanted to ditch the Thunderbird nameplate entirely, and couldn’t see the point of the four-seat model, which was a risky bet at that time. McNamara fought for it, and won, and the result was one of the most influential cars of the postwar ear, and a major success for Ford.
McNamara championed the original Falcon, which turned out to be a huge success. He also pushed for the intermediate Fairlane, which stole the show from GM’s 1961-63 “senior” compacts and forced GM to react with redesigned, larger competitors for 1964.
His decision to use a proposed Thunderbird styling study as the basis for the 1961 Continental was a very smart move, and a radical one, too, given that it had VERY clean styling and was appreciably smaller than the land yachts then being sold as Lincolns. (Remember that he made this decision in 1958, at the height of the tailfins-and-chrome era, when people expected luxury cars to be huge.)
The proliferation of models at Ford – the Thunderbird and Fairlane, in particular – went beyond what Ford had been trying to do with the Edsel. Ford had been trying to match GM’s divisional structure set up by Alfred P. Sloan with the Edsel. McNamara ended up underminining GM’s structure, although I don’t know if he realized what he was doing, and the results really didn’t become apparent until long after he was gone from Ford.
The stair-step structure devised by Sloan worked best when each division offered one basic vehicle, and used a divisional powertrain. With the proliferation of models, pressures mounted on GM to have divisions share more components, which eroded brand identity. Meanwhile, dealers were clamoring for a wider variety of vehicles to sell, which resulted in Buick selling Specials and Skylarks that were less expensive and smaller than Chevrolet Impalas.
Iacocca continued the process that McNamara had set in motion with the Mustang and LTD.
Today, we accept that “mass-market marques” (Ford, Chevrolet, Dodge and Toyota) sell relatively expensive vehicles, and we expect them to offer a wide variety of models. The luxury marques, meanwhile, have moved down with lower priced offerings (although the smart ones – Mercedes, Lexus, BMW and Audi – keep offering ultra-luxury vehicles to maintain their image).
The real victims of this process were the old-line medium price marques – Oldsmobile, Buick, Pontiac and Mercury. Given that GM’s real source of strength was its medium-price divisions (Ford had matched Chevrolet over the years, but Mercury was never any real competition for Buick, Oldsmobile and Pontiac), their downfall was the corporation’s downfall, too. McNamara helped set into motion the events that would make this happen.
McNamara’s Falcon and its success was pure serendipity – the right car, at the right time, a severe recession. It couldn’t have been planned, since the Falcon was five years in the making. The austere styling rang a chord with the public’s black mood.
That the Falcon came to be was not controversial. But the austere product was what McNamara was all about…Iacocca fought him on that; early models were much more decorative and stylistic. Iacocca thought it was a clunker; but just as the time was all wrong for the Edsel, it was perfect for the McNamara Falcon.
But Lido didn’t have it wrong, either. He took that Falcon, five years later, put a stylish body on it, upped the sticker price…and outsold the Falcon’s introductory-year numbers with the Mustang. Say what you will about Iacocca…he knew what the public would buy.
I base my opinion of McNamara on histories of Ford; of the toned-down models during his mercifully-brief tenure as Ford president; and on his later debacle in the Department of Defense. Ford execs then and later, believed he was all-bullshit-no-beef; one giant act.
McNamara “saved” Ford from its utterly disastrous 1950s expansion effort. The Breech boys vainly thought they could beat GM by taking Sloan’s hierarchy of brands strategy to a ridiculous extreme . . . like giving the Continental divisional status. The Edsel was only one part of an enormously expensive campaign to make inroads into the premium and luxury car markets.
McNamara, in contrast, recognized that Ford was too small to engage in a frontal attack of GM. He instead exploited weaknesses in the Sloan model, e.g., by virtually abandoning the full-sized, premium-priced class in 1961 and instead hitting GM where they weren’t.
Here I think it was an advantage that McNamara wasn’t an auto industry insider. Group think was so intense during that period that the Sloan model was sacrosanct. Those few who challenged it (most notably AMC’s George Romney) were viewed as cranks.
The cranks were proven right for reasons that were entirely predictable — except to those wearing blinders.
What they “saved” Ford from was having a separate, identifiable Mercury that made the 1949-1959 years its best. The Breech boys also instituted rational corporate organization into the Ford system…prior to that, the business was run on Henry Ford’s whim, with no understanding of whether the company was profitable or where its costs were.
Henry kept the bookkeepers on edge and in the dark…they actually estimated corporate expenses by averaging out bills, then WEIGHING them to figure out what they owed each month. Henry, the First, would regularly fire accountants and clerks out of spite, en masse they had his contempt and no security at the job.
It was the Whiz Kids which took the accounting department, made it into Ford Finance, and made it the dominant power. The bright boys in Finance loved it…they didn’t need to plan product, or market it, or engineer it. They just sat on the sidelines and sniped…and manipulated numbers to stifle projects. POWER…they had power; they had Henry II’s ear.
They ran the corporation into the wall in the 1980s. It was THEY, the bean counters, which cursed the world with the Panther…the ultimate Brougham.
Well, up until the recession — which began just about the time the ’58 Edsel went on sale — there was a very strong middle-class, mid-price market. In 1955, the #3 car in America behind Ford and Chevy was not Plymouth, but Buick! The original purpose of the E-car program was to let Ford tap that huge market, and fill the large gap between Lincoln and Mercury.
Since Buick, Olds, and Pontiac together outsold Mercury by between three and four to one in that era, it was an eminently logical goal. The problem was that the internal politics muddied that objective so much that the Edsel ended up straddling Mercury in a really confusing way, not unlike the hazy relationship between DeSoto and Dodge at Chrysler.
Eh, I think you give Ford execs too much credit. Launching a new brand is enormously expensive. You shouldn’t do it based upon short-range trends. The alert catsup oracle of the mid-50s could see demographic shifts that would ultimately shift the market away from premium-priced big cars. That was a classic boom-bust market.
However, even if you don’t buy that argument I’d invite you to consider a more prosaic point: Ford wasn’t big enough to sustain two distinct premium-priced brands. Even if Ford’s timing and execution had been better the end result would have been the same . . . except more drawn out and painful.
…Why wasn’t Ford big enough? It had outsold Chevrolet several times. Up until WWII, it was bigger than General Motors.
It could have regained that size and momentum, had they had their finger on America’s pulse. They didn’t; they made a long string of marketing mistakes.
One of them was the Austerity Period which preceded McNamara’s presidency but that he was pushing and was part of. The cars were Spartan; the design industrial. It was the Iacocca era which made Ford a front-runner in style and premium interior design…compare the interiors of a 1968 Chevrolet and Ford.
Ford could have grown, as Honda grew from a cycle maker to a cycle-maker with a novelty car, to one of the biggest worldwide automakers and with the greatest customer loyalty. They started with one man in a shop; and now rival Toyota.
Ford could have done that, with the right moves and some luck. They had neither.
GM first outsold Ford in 1931, and never looked back. By the eve of World War II, GM was the largest industrial corporation in the world. Ford was not larger than GM in the early 1940s.
Many credible historians believe that if it hadn’t been for the artificial stimulus provided by war production, the Ford Motor Company would have gone bankrupt by 1943 or 1944. At one point during the war, after Edsel Ford’s death, the government actually explored the possibility of taking over the Ford Motor Company and handing over its management to Studebaker! The thought was that the Ford Motor Company was an important defense contractor, the war had not yet been won, and the government did not want to risk its collapse under the leadership of a nearly senile Henry Ford I and Harry Bennett.
Chrysler Corporation outsold the entire Ford Motor Company by the late 1930s. Plymouth had actually come very close to ousting Ford Division from the number-two spot during the 1940 model year.
By the late 1930s, Ford cars were perceived as stylish, but outdated mechanically. Ford was among the last to adopt hydraulic brakes (Plymouth did in 1928; Chevrolet in 1936), and didn’t adopt independent front suspension until the 1949 model, years after Chevrolet and Plymouth had done so.
Ford was clearly moribund by the late 1930s…only the V-8 mystique, the Bob Gregorie styling and then World War II kept the company going until Henry Ford II took over. It really wasn’t much competition for GM or even Chrysler.
You’re correct that Ford was technically insolvent in the early 1940s. That was wholly due to Henry’s impulsiveness, bullheadedness and advancing senility. He had made any number of horrific marketing and product decisions; he did not brook contradicting opinions (he mercilessly abused Edsel for exactly that) and he surrounded himself with yes-men and bullies who hoped to control Ford on Henry’s demise.
Henry Ford built the business; but he was nine-tenths of the reason why it lost its way and almost failed.
Henry II and Ernest Breech were there for exactly that reason. The Department of Defense was afraid that Harry Bennet, head of Ford Service Department (the official goon squad) and Head Toady to Henry, would wind up either owning or running Ford. That was unpalatable even to the Pentagon; and Henry II was released by the Navy to attend to family business – basically to take the company from Old Henry.
And Henry II hired Breech. And would never have saved the company without Breech and his team. And, had he listened more and played power games less, could possibly have surpassed or at least matched GM in sales.
…just read geeber’s post; he was touching on many of the same issues. And interprets them in somewhat different ways.
It’s all good…
Your opinion is so biased and based on your own narrow-minded opinion that is no better than anyone who has a basic knowledge of automobiles. Such negative and biased opinioned journalism is a Joke, and makes anyone more interested in all Edsels. Thanks for a bad lesson in automobile journalism, and demonstrating to all what poor writing really is…..
The ’60 only made it to market because Henry Ford II felt that he had made a commitment to its dealers , some of whom had given up lucrative Olds , Pontiac and Chrysler franchises to take on the Edsel. (There were never many stand alone Edsel dealers , but they certainly did exist. They were bought out after Edsel folded) .Henry Deuce had been quoted in several publications saying that a 1960 model was going to be produced. When the car was presented to the dealer body in the early fall of 1959 , they sat on their wallets and did not order any cars. By the end , there were about 1450 dealers that still handled the make and total production was 2846 . That’s less than two cars apiece. The crickets chirping out in the marketplace convinced the company that the Edsel had no future and sort of vindicated Robert McNamara , who was FoMoCo president and confirmed Edsel hater. He had tried to strangle the car from the launch but the sales disaster in the ’60 launch finally gave him the leverage to drive a stake in the heart of the whole project.
It’s a known fact that Edsel produced only 76 convertibles in the short ’60 selling season (a bit over 45 days) . But capitalism being what it is , that scarcity has led to some unscrupulous crooks using the much more common Ford Sunliner to counterfeit an Edsel Ranger ragtop and pocket big $$$. The car is pure Ford except for some trim and assorted pieces that are easy to crib from an Edsel donor two door. Sales of the convertible are rare , usually between friends and for BIG money. If you are offered a rare classic for a suspiciously low price, hire an expert to examine it.
Also, Ford originally intended to sell the Comet as an Edsel, starting later in the 1960 model year, so I think the big car was partly intended as a stopgap. Ford even produced “Edsel Comet” dealer signage before the ax came down.
I’m not sure that stopgap is the right word. I doubt Ford seriously considered maintaining the Edsel brand without a full-sized entry.
Another factor may have been that for 1961 Mercury was to lose its distinct body and stop competing in the mid-to-upper end of the premium-priced class. The downsized Mercury effectively bumped the Edsel from its market position. Indeed, the Mercury’s rear styling could have just as easily been used on the Edsel if it had made it to 1961.
I can’t believe I’m willing to admit this… I like the 60 Edsel. If I were to consider one at all (not likely) it’d have to be a 60.
That face does appear dangerously similar to a 60 Tempest.
It’s not a bad-looking car. Almost normal…but the trouble is, today no one would equate it with an Edsel. Make it almost not worth the trouble of owning and restoring one.
Given how cheaply the 1960 Edsel was created it should look normal — since it was a 1960 big Ford with a few dollars of custom trim. (The budget for the Edsel styling job was only $10 million, most of which I suspect was the grille.)
I think the 1959 Edsels are pretty normal-looking, as well. They still have the vertical grille theme, but it’s just a little triangle, not the maw of the ’58. It’s not any weirder than the Alfa scudetto.
THe 60 model is much better looking than the awful early models Ive never seen a 60 Edsel live but there are a couple of 58 citations around here and I remember seeing a completely rusted out convertable for sale on line for moonbeam money a perfect donor for a Ford bodyshell rebuild
Originally the 1960 Edsel was supposed to have a much more prominent grille. Someone actually constructed the entire front end – including the grille – based on old styling studio photos and installed it on a restored Edsel hardtop coupe. It featured a very prominent “bar” in the middle that was supposed to recall the horse-collar of the 1958 model.
I don’t doubt that the ’60 was intended as a stopgap, and being such I’ve always wondered why they bothered with the unique sheetmetal and rear bumper to accommodate the vertical taillights. The Canadian ’60 Meteor used a triple round taillight treatment in the Ford rear panel that would have worked nicely for the Edsel since it had some design continuity with the ’59.
http://www.oldcarbrochures.com/static/Canada/1960%20Meteor%20Brochure/1960%20Meteor-20.html
While on the subject of Meteors, I’ve always thought that the ’61 Meteor looked like what you would get if you set out to design a ’61 Edsel as a variant of the ’61 Ford. There doesn’t seem to be any substantiation that it was originally intended as a ’61 Edsel, though, and there do not seem to be any extant styling photos of any ’61 Edsel clays. Normal styling lead times would suggest that ’61 models would be in the works by November 1959 (when the Edsel was euthanized), so if in fact no work was being done on a ’61 Edsel, it may substantiate that McNamara had made a firm decision to discontinue the brand regardless of how well the ’60 models did.
Oh my, what a strange looking car that ’61 Meteor is! We had a ’61 Ford when I was little so it made a big impression. Seeing those four headlights spread out across the front of this Meteor makes me a little woozy. And hockey sticks on the back, naturally. Even weirder than the Edsels.
Check out the brochure:
http://forum.love-fords.org/showthread.php?837-1961-Meteor-Brochures
Would love one of the last few Ranger Convertibles. Lilac frost…
I actually own one of the very few 1960 Ford Edsels that are left. The car is 100% original. If you know anyone looking, please reach out to me. The car has won many awards!!!
How much do you want for the 60 Edsel? Looks like it’s a 4 door hardtop. Do you have the VIN info?