A great snapshot from William Garrett, who left this comment: My dad took the picture of my grandfather and grandmother with the car and my uncle on the top of the snow bank. Summer 1959.
And another opportunity for me to reiterate that the Edsel’s front end styling was not one of the reasons it flopped.
Its front end was consistent with a common thread of styling at the time, and nobody thought it was ugly or weird or sucking a lemon. That all happened after it failed, as we love to pile on, ridiculing failure. Schadenfreude is delicious! And ragging on the Edsel’s face became a national pastime.
What helped to kill Edsel was its name. If I had been an executive at Ford when this car was in its developmental stages, I would have said, “Surely, you can come up with something better than ‘Edsel’.”
See my post for information about using the EDSEL name. EDSEL FORD was actually a son ? Of Henry. He was involved in styling of classic 48 Lincoln Continental, but Henry was not as concerned about styling as mechanicals and costs. EDSEL was not favored by Henry. The BETSY is fiction, but hits close to reality of FORD family.
Edsel helped bring about the first Continental in 1939. Edsel died in 1943.
EDSEL was probably the most researched car in auto history. Millions were spent on surveys, focus groups, styling AND choosing a name for this new car. FORD family did not really want to use EDSEL name. But after long quest ( including hiring poet Marianne Moore to create a name) EDSEL was finally chosen. EDSEL was the right car at the Wrong time. 58 saw a recession with all makes suffering low sales. Hard for the new kid on the block to find friends! Actually think the controversial grille was somewhat similar to classic PACKARD grille which was resurrected for a 56? PACKARD show car called the REQUEST. As a side note see the 80s? Film THE BETSY, starring Tommy Lee Jones, a fictionalized story about Hardiman(FORD) Motors. A family business with much drama trying to develop a new car.
“Resilient Bullet”, “Ford Silver Sword”, “Mongoose Civique”, “Varsity Stroke”, “Pastelogram”, “Andante con Moto”, “Utopian Turtletop” and “Edsel”.
Poet Marianne Moore was enlisted to come up with these gems – or at least some of them. Utopian Turtletop is probably the most accurate vibe of the times, and might have been a play on, or a misunderstanding of the “Turret Top” label GM put on its new 1935 all steel roof cars.
Marianne Moore was never hired by Ford; she volunteered to suggest some names to help stimulate thought (I thought “Andante” was a good name for a car, but sounds more like a model name than a marque). Henry Ford II was always against naming the car Edsel (“I don’t want my dad’s name spinning around on millions of hubcaps” or something like that), and the firm hired to find a name eventually narrowed it to four – the four names used on Edsel models (except wagons). When they asked about “Edsel” as a name, people often thought they said “pretzel”. The final decision to call the car Edsel was made by chairman of the board Ernest Breech in HFII’s absence.
The Packard Predictor show car, and even more so the stillborn proposed “real” ’57 Packards had very Edsel-esque front ends, but in both cases they looked more elegant and less like a toilet seat than the Edsel.
Paid or not, I think it safe to assume Ford (Motor Company) approached Moore as part of its paralysis of analysis developing the Edsel. She was well published in publications such as Life, The New York Times and The New Yorker. She was a known public figure.
The implication that Breech pulled a fast one on HFII – president, future chairman and the guy with his name on the building doesn’t play. Naming the Edsel was a long cycle, and The Duce’s tacit approval of putting his dad’s name on the car is a given.
“Pretzel?” There wouldn’t have been a soul in the Glass House that didn’t know who Edsel was.
The job of choosing a name for the new “E-car” fell to Edsel’s advertising agency, Foote, Cone, and Belding (I believe they changed agencies partway through the car’s run, or at least their approach). It was one of their name-scouters that made the quip about “did you say pretzel?”. The people asked were randoms on the street, not Ford insiders in the Glass House. Breech making the final decision to call it Edsel (maybe the first name they thought of before the long search for another) is from the mouth of C. Gayle Warnock, then Edsel’s public relations director and more recently the author of “The Edsel Affair” and its sequel. He was there when the decision was made, and thinks Breech “was brown-nosing Mr. Ford”.
You nailed it 👏. Couldn’t recall all of those suggestions, but Utopian Turtletop seems perfect for 59 GM flat roof 4 doors! 👍
Maybe I’m just used to it, and my Grandfather owned one, but I find the front of the 1958 Edsel good looking, and probably the best of any ’58 Ford. It’s the back I object to, its kinda weird.
Love the period photo, could be my Grandparents standing next to the car.
I think I’m starting to get used to this….
We knew Edsel in the sixties, when we were in college. He was a nice young guy. We had friends who had Edsels. Thay were rather luxurious,powerful, and styled consistent with many other cars of the period. Their styling was not an issue.
Um, Edsel Ford died in 1943…
See my response. I know my history. Not difficult to remember.
Perhaps you are referring to Edsel Ford II, son of HF II who was born in 1948. The car was named after his grandfather, the first Edsel Ford, only child of Henry, who died in 1943 at age 50 of stomach cancer.
Orrect.
1959 Edsel Ranger with a 429 Big Block Ford. “EDZILLA”.
I personally like the style of the ’58 Edsel, always have, and I feel that anyone who tries lampooning it with the same tired language is just oblivious of automotive history. Besides the factual events others have already cited, just compare it to another of Ford’s offerings that year: The ’58 Lincoln (go ahead, Google pictures of that car). That car makes the Edsel look conservative from an appearance perspective, any day of the week you care to pick. One author once summed up the failure well: The Edsel was a marketing miscue, but hardly the catastrophe it is often held to be; Ford was making record profits a couple years later.
There was a nice car and brand to be had there, they just missed the mark a bit. The Ranger/Pacer was the only opportunity, replacing what Mercury had been through ’56… a longer Ford with great styling. The front was fine as was the name, and the Ranger/Pacer had the right length, but the deck was too long and the hood too short. The body and rear wheelse needed to move around 5 inches rearward, with wheelbase increasing by that amount forward of the firewall. And the body sides needed nice integrated skirts to complete the shape. Also, the design needed to stay static for 2-3 years to settle in. Folks are being asked to spend money on something more costly than everything except their house. Some jump in early but most want to be sure that they are making a safe investment. It takes time to create a new brand.
These never came down under officially, though I expect there are some here now.
Was ‘Edsel’ a common boy’s name in America back then? Obviously it isn’t since about ’58 or so. 🙂 I’ve never heard of another one though, and old Henry doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy to invent a new name…
They didnt come to NZ either but there are plenty of them about and judging by some of the dunga condition some are in they’ve been here a long time some came in as lightly used cars in the early 60s there was a lot of that happening but you had to keep the car on the road two years to avoid massive import duties, someone unearthed a loophole in the laws and cars as hand luggage from Japan started a tsunami from everywhere.
Correct.
According to newspaper accounts, Danny Thomas said that the Edsel looked “like an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon” and this was reported on October 4, 1957, one month to the day after the September 4, 1957 introduction. So no, those comments were made pretty early on, and they likely helped tank the Edsel along with many other factors, not least of those being the recession that occurred at that time.
I think perhaps the real question should be “should the Edsel have succeeded?”. The two lower end models were on a Ford wheel base (118 inches) with a body length of 213 inches (lower end Mercury). The two upper end Edsel’s were on a 124 inch wheelbase putting them just under the top of the line Mercury with a body length just under the top of the line Mercury.
The Edsel’s did come with items not found on Fords or Mercury’s. The first year sales were not bad considering that it was a bad year for automobiles. But car sales were generally better for 1959, but Edsel’s were down. The 59 Edsel model lineup changed too, so that may have been a factor.
I think perhaps a lower end Mercury was a better choice, at least for 1959.
I worked as an art director at Foote Cone and Belding in the 60s… and I read Fairfax Cones book about the ad game…he said the Ford people said you can come up with as many names as you want to…BUT you can’t use any family names. Well looked what they chose. And the team at FCB DIDNT LIKE the unveiling from the first sight of it…they tried to tell Ford execs that the public wanted a mid sized car?..they just wouldn’t listen to the r and d that the agency had d worked on. Fred Ludicins the illustration at the agency didn’t think it would fly at all…he was right…bd.
I got a little more of the story about the Edsel from my dad.
So my grandfather, who was very much a GM man personally, owned a small used car lot in Dallas (“Many used cars with many unused miles!”). At the time, his personal car was a 55 Buick Century sedan, but for the family vacation in the summer of 59, which was going to be a trip to Glacier National Park and Banff, Canada, my grandfather pulled the 58 Edsel off the lot because it had an aftermarket, under-dash air conditioner already installed, which should have made the trip from Texas to Montana more comfortable. Of course, that A/C crapped out about 100 miles outside of Dallas, so it turned into a regular, hot road trip.
And while it certainly snows a lot at the top of Logan Pass in Glacier NP, that photo was a bit of an illusion. That particular snow bank was where the plows had piled up the snow at the edge of the parking lot.