For those of you grown weary of today’s focus on imports, here’s a good old Edsel, looking quite nice in bright red. It was posted to the Cohort by That Guy 1960. And for you bicycle fans, that is his personal Schwinn Cruiser on the Edsel’s left.
Unlike the 1959 Edsel seen previously on CC, this one most likely has its original V8.
The high-end model in a four door hardtop, no less. I think that this car’s transformation from punch line to object of desire is complete.
Agreed. It is the quintessential period piece.
“I think that this car’s transformation from punch line to object of desire is complete.”
It’s always that way with the fallen-flag models. Look at the attention given 1966 Studebakers. Or, now, AMC Gremlins. DeSotos…Kaisers…Aero-Willys…the list goes on and on…
Scarcity seems to be nine-tenths of desirability. While this one’s a good “period piece” as it represents the FoMoCo cars well, a combination of boxiness and fashion, with flat side glass but dogleg A-posts…the fact is, damned few Edsels got sold that year, 1959.
Beautiful, very desireable, completely lust worthy.
The only model Edsel that looked OK.
Blecch — I could not disagree more. Make mine a ’58 or ’60.
I guess it’s not Edsel’s vertical grill design theme that’s bad, it’s how it is executed. It looks good here. I guess any design theme can look ridiculous if executed poorly, witness the Acura shield grille and the Lincoln’s baleen whale grille.
I am not a fan of the ’58’s . . . I prefer the cleaner look of the ’59 Edsel and I like the ’60’s even if the ’60’s were more “Ford Like” in appearance. For ’60 FoMoCo fans, (and I like ’em a lot too). . . . there’s the ’60 Canadian Meteor. The best of the ’60 Ford and ’60 Edsel rolled into one!
very nice and in red, too.
but i’ll take the 50-53 Chevy p/u in the background
Very cool to see one of my pictures used for an outtake. I do some of my best car-spotting when I’m out for a ride on the ol’ cruiser. I’m not a huge fan of Edsels, but this one was pretty appealing– it wasn’t one of those over-restored cars you’d be afraid to ever drive, but was in very good shape, and very original-looking.
There’s a ’58 two-door in the L.A. Craigslist if anyone’s interested. It runs and drives, but the seller is worried it might be too rusty to restore- hence the low price.
So what model is this?
Assuming a 1959 – a lot better looking than many of the ’59’s aired here… Helped of course by an excellent restoration.
The Corsair was the high model, which this one is. The Ranger was the base model. 1959 was down from the 4 models offered in 58, which went (from lowest to highest) Ranger, Pacer, Corsair and Citation.
Thanks JP
Every time I see an Edsel I’m reminded of the first “dirty” (aka, slightly risque) joke I ever heard back in the 5th grade (1961):
Q: What the definition of a loser?
A: A pregnant prostitute driving an Edsel with a Nixon bumper sticker.
How times ended up changing. Pregnancy ceased to be a scandal, Nixon became president after all, and Edsel’s became both collectible and iconic.
You know, it’s really rather a handsome car. Perhaps if the Edsel had been launched with the ’59 front end, instead of that awful 1958 horse collar, it might have had a fighting chance.
When was the ’59 styling locked in? Was probably planned before the 58’s were unveiled.
The 1960 looked like a rush job after it was realized the brand was flopping.
My understanding is that both ’59 AND ’60 models were rush jobs; desperate attempts to distance the subsequent years from the hideous excesses of the ’58.
My screenprinting company, Hollywood Loser, makes several T-shirts with old cars (Bentley, ‘Vette, Firebird, XKE, MGA, Avanti, etc) silkscreened on them — including one featuring a ’59 Edsel four-door h/t very much like this CC:
http://hollywoodloser.com/shirts/Edsel.html
Personally, I still prefer the ’58 in all its outlandish, lemon-sucking glory. If you’re going to drive a car that’s a rolling punchline, it might as well be the funniest punchline of the bunch.
BTW, Alex’s link to his site has been approved by the Spam-master. We hope to work with Alex on some official CC T-shirts, once we decide on whether we’re changing the logo or not. His shirts are high quality, from the samples he’s sent me 🙂
Yup on both counts.
If I were to get an Edsel, it would definitely be a ’59. It has that distinctive Edsel look, but without the gynecological grill of the ’58.
Quite a few years ago someone abandoned a 1959 Edsel Pacer 4-door on a lot near us…went over and looked at it, 6-cylinder 3-speed no radio car, light green inside and out. Typical western WA no rust car but the vandals had been at the windows, so it was definitely crusher fodder by the time I saw it. Oddly enough they’d left the license plate on it, so I helped myself to that.
The red car shown is indeed looking good, and will probably stay that way for a long time.
I really like the ’59 Edsel. In hindsight, it’s too bad the ’58 wasn’t wearing the ’59 face. However, I’m looking at this from today’s point of view. I do know Edsel was hastily re-organized for ’59, with the dropping of the Mercury bodied senior cars. Edsel advertising in ’59 emphasized being priced “right down there with models of Plymouth, Chevrolet AND FORD.” Mileage maker six made it’s debut in the ’59 Edsel.
I recall reading that Robert McNamara hated the whole Edsel idea, and set about doing everything he could to kill it once he took over as head of the company. I once did some research and found that in 1959, the top Ford got more expensive and the bottom Mercury got less expensive, essentially squeezing the Edsel out of the lineup. Also, the 58 Edsel had suffered from some pretty bad quality, so the car had not developed the greatest of reputations.
McNamara did not like the Edsel, by all accounts — Tom Bonsall said that right after its introduction, McNamara allegedly told account reps from Foote, Cone and Belding, the ad agency, that they planned to kill the car.
It’s worth noting that McNamara was not head of the company at that point: he was group vice president for the car and truck group. (McNamara was actually only president of Ford for a few weeks in the fall of 1960, about a year after the Edsel was already dead.) That position did give him a lot of clout, but Ford in that era was very much run by committee, so it was not something he was in a position to unilaterally kill.
The ’59 cars were finalized before the ’58s went on sale. There was a reorganization, though: shortly before the ’58 model year began, Mercury was reintegrated with Lincoln, and in early 1958 Edsel was merged into Lincoln-Mercury, now headed by former Packard president Jim Nance.
“By the time the first Edsel hit the showroom, the country was in a recession. (For comparison, 1958 DeSoto sales were down 54% from 1957. Buick was down 33%, Mercury 48%, Oldsmobile 18%, Dodge 47%, Pontiac 28%.. probably the worst year since World War II to unveil a new car line!)”
http://www.edsel.com/pages/edsel58.htm
I always wonder what a new Edsel would look like.
I have never really bought the “1958’s economy was the reason for the Edsel’s failure” line. The Chrysler brands plummeted because of their disastrous 1957 quality problems. And Mercury’s decline was probably partly caused by Edsel, which undoubtedly sopped up sales that Mercury would have gotten. Also, Mercury was trying to play up a couple of weight classes from where it had been almost its entire history.
Ford had virtually none of the medium/upper medium priced market to start with in 1957, so how could it have done much worse with a bad 1958? The real reason Edsel failed was that Mercury completely failed in its new role, and almost immediately started to revert back to its prior role, a role that Edsel had been created for. Edsel started out of the gate with several problems: quirky front end styling (although the rest of the car was not at all bad looking) and shaky quality and not all that much distinction from either Mercury or Ford, and having McNamara as a sworn enemy.
Edsel started from zero, and if it and the new Mercury had been right, virtually every sale would have been a conquet sale. With more patience and better support (and better products), the new Edsel and Mercury would have out-lasted DeSoto (and given Chrysler division more of a squeeze) and been positioned for major market growth starting around 1962.
I disagree about the first part. Ford did very well in 1957, much of it on the strength of the long-wheelbase Fairlane models, which were priced in what had previously been Mercury’s range. The ’58s promptly lost momentum, in part because of the recession, in part because the public just didn’t like the facelifted styling as much as they did the ’57’s.
The decision to have Edsel straddle Mercury was one steeped in complicated corporate politics, of which McNamara’s disdain was only one aspect. Ford had had a series of marketing studies going back to ’49 saying they needed something to fill the gap between Mercury and Lincoln, since Mercury could not be reasonably expected to take on Oldsmobile AND Pontiac AND Buick. That was what the E-car was originally supposed to do, but instead, Ford tried to push Mercury upmarket and have Edsel take its place. There were already signs in ’57 that that wasn’t going to work: Mercury did not do particularly well that year, probably in large part because they dumped the low-end Medalist and Custom models. Mercury customers found that the cheapest ’57 Mercury was now $300 to $400 more than in ’56, which I suspect was a bigger jump than a lot of existing customers were willing to make, new body shell or no. Mercury restored the Medalist line in ’58, but that only exacerbated the overlap with Edsel. As it was, the two makes together managed only about 75% of Mercury’s 1957 volume, which hadn’t been its best showing to begin with.
“I always wonder what a new Edsel would look like.”
You’re not alone.
I can’t cite sources — although I think it was Iacocca’s first book — but something that made the whole Edsel Exercise so exasperating for non-Edsel-supporters within Ford at the time was that there was ample market research indicating the car-buying public was itching for something smaller and sportier. Instead, the top-down mentality of the corp’s higher-ups insisted that THEY knew what the public wanted better than the public did; and if chrome-dripping, garage-bursting barges were what made the corp the biggest bucks, they by dammit would just cram chrome-dripping garage-bursting barges down the public’s throat! “They’ll take it and they’ll LIKE it!” Big-Three Golden-Era arrogance at its finest.
Of course, the public finally got that “smaller and sportier” Ford they’d been requesting for the better part of a decade. It was called the Mustang. If anybody in a position of influence in Dearborn in the mid-to-late ’50s had a clue, or paid attention to what the market research was saying, they could’ve been riding that money-pony seven years earlier… while avoiding the $400M Edsel debacle altogether.
…Or by postponing the Edsel till the 2000s and then doing it as an upscale Taurus (see below).
As a kid at the time, I well remember the excitement about this new car from Ford. But the excitement turned into ridicule when we all saw the car – it just was not well styled and deserved all the jokes. And the market segment had too much competition (DeSoto would be gone within three years). I have a friend whose family collected the whole range of Edsels for years (bought very cheap) and she indicates that the first year models suffered a lot from quality issues; she drove daily a 59 for years and says it was a good car. I thought the 60 was essentially pure Ford with different trim? I never liked any of them, not then, not now.