(first posted 11/26/2015) As Americans celebrate Thanksgiving today, we’ll be grateful for family, friends and abundant food. In addition, the car nuts among us can give thanks for the bounty of automotive offerings that are uniquely American. We’ve been blessed with an unprecedented choice in vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age. Whether good, bad or ugly, there have always been 4-wheeled creations available to satisfy almost any car craving. Some of these cars were spectacularly successful, while others were total turkeys.
While we now view the Edsel as the poster child for automotive failure, there was some logic (along with a lot of hubris and bad timing) to its development. As the 1950s progressed and the world worked to leave the horrors of WWII behind, U.S. automakers focused on satisfying the growing American affluence with a dizzying array of mid-priced offerings. Ford felt the need to broaden their upmarket range of cars. So with great fanfare and expense, the new Edsel division was launched. Did the hype and publicity extend to Motor Trend’s reviews of the new cars? Let’s go back in time and take a look.
The early renderings accurately captured a lot of the styling cues that would come to define the Edsel. Arguably, the illustration of the “E car” front view on page 40, with a smaller scale grille and no “horse collar” inset, was better looking than the final product.
Right off the bat, Motor Trend expressed skepticism about the new Edsel division, noting how challenging it would be for the car to break into the highly competitive mid-priced segment and immediately command a large share of sales. Little did Motor Trend realize the accuracy of their predictions. Edsel did not even come close to selling the 200,000+ units needed to break even: first year production topped out at only 61,925 units. In the mid-priced bracket, only DeSoto, with 49,445 units sold and already starting its death throes, did worse.
Other aspects of the new car didn’t seem particularly revolutionary, and there was little new ground broken from an engineering standpoint, other than the steering-wheel-mounted automatic transmission controls, known as “Teletouch,” which were standard on the more premium Corsair and Citation models, optional on the Ranger and Pacer. As the editors tip-toed around the politically correct way to assess the new car, they couldn’t help going back to the car’s—ahem—“distinctiveness” as the Edsel’s main raison d’etre.
There was more to come, as Motor Trend would soon conduct an extended-use test, driving two Edsels cross-country. The first car tested was a Ford-based Pacer, one of 20,097 built for 1958, representing the first step up in the model hierarchy from the entry-level Ranger. The second car tested was a Corsair, one of only 9,233 produced, which used a Mercury body and was positioned as more premium than the Pacer. Each car was picked up in Detroit and driven around the country, ultimately ending up in Los Angeles. The Pacer, after heading to New York, took a Southern route through New Orleans (fun to think of that car plying the streets of my hometown in late 1957). The Corsair also went east to New York City, then took a more northerly trek to California.
As 1950’s-era automotive reviews went, this write-up was about as negative as it got. The Edsel Corsair was singled out for especially poor assembly quality and myriad mechanical issues. The handling of the Corsair was also harshly criticized with some rather colorful language. The Pacer fared a bit better, since it seemed to have been more carefully built, though Motor Trend noted that it wasn’t that much different than the Ford on which it was based.
The Edsel’s styling came into question as well, with a few anecdotes about reaction from folks across the country, not all of it favorable. It was implied that Motor Trend’s Editor, Walt Woron, didn’t care for the design, though William Carroll, the article’s author, said he did like the Edsel’s looks (typical Motor Trend, trying to keep everyone happy). However, Motor Trend clearly stated they were unsure about the Edsel’s mission and the product’s merits.
Motor Trend’s coverage was in keeping with the marketplace reaction—tepid at best. By the time the extended-use test was underway, it had to have been quite clear that Ford’s new baby was a dud. The public wasn’t buying, Ford itself was rapidly backing away, and Motor Trend simply let the car slip off its radar.
But we should be grateful for the many good ways the Edsel did leave its mark. First, the Edsel earned a small but loyal following of automotive masochists, who collected and preserved the cars, warts and all.
My son and I found one of these beautifully maintained specimens at Hershey in October 2014. According to the owner, this Spring Green Ranger was used as an actual press car back in 1957. In addition to the unique Edsel press kit materials showcased on the sun visor, there is further evidence to support this car’s yeoman-like beginnings: in the Edsel section of the book The Cars of Lincoln Mercury, author George Dammann notes that Ford Motor Company designated green as the official color for the Edsel promotional fleet. I can easily imagine that this car did complete a tour of duty with the media. Could it possibly be the actual Edsel Ranger that Walt Woron drove across country?
Another potential beneficiary of the Edsel was Pontiac. Yes, Pontiac! A mere ten years after the styling fiasco of the Edsel’s unfortunate vertical grille, Pontiac adapted the look into a more palatable style. Ever since the Packard Predictor show car, Detroit designers just weren’t going to give up on capturing that “classic” look from the 1930s on a production car. The Edsel demonstrated what not to do, something that GM stylists must have kept in mind.
Even in the rear, the Edsel’s unique, boomerang-shaped taillights were conceivably reinterpreted by Pontiac into hockey sticks for their late-1960’s full sized cars. Perhaps I’m in a pre-Thanksgiving dinner delirium, but to my eyes both the ’58 Edsel and the ’68 Pontiac sported some very attractive, unusual—and similar—taillight shapes.
I’d further argue that in the long-term, perversely enough, another beneficiary of the Edsel bust was actually the Ford Motor Company. Obviously not for the enormous loss suffered (the estimated Edsel development cost of $250 million equals $2.1 billion adjusted—ouch!), but rather in the strategic retrenchment following that loss. As the Edsel was dying on the vine, Ford was busy developing the Falcon, which would represent a very different kind of car. The new compact became the best selling of the “small” offerings from Detroit and was very successful in taking Ford back to its more humble roots.
Nor did the lessons from the Edsel fiasco stop there for Ford. When the inevitable lure to go upmarket started calling again, FoMoCo was much more disciplined and strategic in their approach. They placed a much smaller, much better bet on a well-targeted, slightly-upscale specialty product with cost-effective underpinnings. The result, the 1964 1/2 Mustang, proved to be an enormous game changer in the marketplace, and one we can still be thankful for in 2015.
Happy turkey day to everyone!
Related reading:
This is the first time I see those Styling sketches and the very first car is in fact very elegant and has European air about it. If only they remained true to that style…
The pictures in the article were MotorTrends rendering of what they thought the Edsel would look like. I agree the pictures are quite a bit better, especially the first one. Ford shot themselves in the foot by not supplying Packard with Lincoln body shells. Had they done this, Packard would have come out with a car that would have used a similar grill. The Edsel wouldn’t have looked so strange and it would have had a connection with a Luxury brand. The picture is a drawing of the planned 1957 Packard.
If you want to own your own Edsel but don’t have the room, buy an HO scale one. You can even read the name on the grill (if you have good enough eyes) The detail is amazing. I think that the real reason the Edsel failed is because the name just didn’t work. A last name for a car company is fine, but using a first name is narcissistic and people see that.
The theory behind the Edsel had merit. Ford simply wanted specific lines of cars to compete directly with GM products:
Cadillac – Lincoln
Buick – Continental
Oldsmobile – Edsel
Pontiac – Mercury
Chevrolet – Ford
It might have worked, too, if the timing hadn’t been so bad and the Edsel hadn’t been executed so poorly. It was just the ‘perfect storm’ combination of negative factors that really did in the car. With something as simple as a better name and more conventional styling, it might have had a chance.
Actually, if you don’t mind a minor correction here to your list, FoMoCo planned that their Continental was to be their new ultra-exclusive top-of-the-line marque, above Lincoln. Then it was a blue about which marque was to be the next one down – Edsel, or Mercury. That is why the public was so confused! Check out the amazing book on this entire story, by Thomas E. Bonsall; Disaster in Dearborn: The Story of the Edsel.
That is an excellent book, I highly recommend it.
You have your Model lines wrong. They were as follows:
Ford–Chevrolet–Plymouth
Edsel–Pontiac–Dodge
Mercury–Oldsmobile/Buick–Desoto/Chrysler
Lincoln–Cadillac–Imperial
The Continental Mark II was a supercar that would have competed with Rolls-Royce and only the Eldorado Brougham
The idea was a good one, since Ford got its butt kicked in the mid-priced field during the 40s, 50s, 60s & 70s.
The Continental was above the Lincoln. It was the price of the most expensive Cadillacs at the time. The makes matched up as follows:
Cadillac – Lincoln/continental
Buick/Oldsmobile – Mercury
Pontiac – Edsel
Chevrolet
Hmmm…
How about splitting Ford to move high-end Fairlane, Skyliner, etc. upladder in competition, thus even cannibalizing FoMoCo’s own upmarket sales?
Gobble gobble.
The 68 Pontiac is a great comparison, but the 70 seems more like a direct crib.
And today we’re cursed with nothing but Edsel like tail lights: Ford, Kia, Hyundai, Acura, Chevrolet, Chrysler, all use some variation. Previous to that the 95-02 Cavalier and the Contour.
So maybe the Edsel did have some influence after all.
The Pontiac is a great comparison, but everyone seems to have forgotten (justifiably) the Edsel SUV, AKA the Subaru B9 Tribeca…
That’s what I thought when I saw a Tribeca for the first time! “Holy cow-an Edsel!”
I thought it was interesting that the February 1957 Motor Trend article had two entirely different sketches of the front — one which was spot on to the production car, and the other being basically a Tribeca with the center element turned upside down.
Ah yes, the other flying vagina.
New Alfa Romeo.
Alfa Romeo from the Edsel-era.
The turkey just went to the oven and now I read of another turkey of a different sort. The reasons for the failure of the Edsel are many: the severe ’58 recession, quirky styling, abysmal fit and finish, a price range that spanned Mercury at both ends, Robert McNamara’s loathing, etc., etc. But what has always puzzled me is why GM could successfully market three mid-price brands while Ford had trouble with one?
To answer your question about GM’s Buick, Oldsmobile and Pontiac success, they are all very old makes. Pontiac was the successor to the Oakland brand, which dates back to the very early 1900’s. Oldsmobile was a very successful brand while Ransom Olds was involved, making the curved dash model. Buick was an early 1900’s brand, and Durant used Buick to finance General Motor as a holding company while he took over Oldsmobile, Oakland and Cadillac. Ford created Mercury just before WWII, and it simply never had any prestige.
Up to the mid-1960’s, Buick, Olds and Pontiac were distinctive in engineering as well as style, with a core of extremely brand loyal customers. These started out as independent companies, brought into the GM fold.
First Mercury, then Edsel, were internally created Ford brands, without a “culture” or history. The public saw less value in that, as the sales figures showed.
Plus B-O-P customers were generally pretty conservative- the “radical”, “all-new” marketing hype around the Edsel probably put off as many buyers as it attracted in this segment.
Ironically there was a radical, all new car launched in this buyers range that did very nicely in sales. It was the new four seater Thunderbird….
The Thunderbird was priced well above the Edsel. Ford sold less than 38,000 Thunderbirds in 1958. The Thunderbird was successful because expectations were much lower.
It was quality more than anything else. The Edsel name became synonymous with being a lemon. Had Ford dedicated a plant to the Edsel, they could have assured proper quality control. The push-button transmissions were also problematic. The odd/objectional styling didn’t help things either. There was price overlap with GM brands in the same manner that there was price overlap with the Edsel. The low end Mercury Medalist, which cost more than comparable Edsels, was not a desirable car. It only came in 2 door post and 4 door sedan, not offering any hardtop models. It also had a smaller less powerful engine in a heavier car. Even though the Edsel was released in the recession year of 1958, Edsel came no where near the projected 200,000 to 400,000 yearly units Ford was seeking. The Edsel lost nearly a third of its sales in 1959, when most brands gained sales that year.
Ditch the ox-yoke and it actually looks decent 🙂
Super Snipe.
The Humber looks WAAAY better 🙂
Try ditching the ox-yoke on the ’59 Edsel front and see what would appear in three years as the intermediate Ford.
Well I’ll be darned 😀
Thanks, just a few tweaks and its the ’62 Fairlane!
Memo to Styling: Recycle that ’59 Edsel front without the center grille, paste it on our new Fairlane, The Deuce will love it!
Recycled Edsel!
You’ve forgotten the 1960 Comet, which was intended to be an Edsel. it was the first to have that front end. Of course, it was going to have an Edsel vertical grille in the middle, but that was removed before it became the Comet.
The ’62 Fairlane was just cribbing the ’60-’61 Comet, by which time that front end design was already old. The 63s already moved away from that look.
And here’s how it was going to look as a compact Edsel.
And the ultimate recycle of the old, tired Edsel-Comet theme: Mercury Meteor!
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/curbside-classics-american/curbside-classic-1963-mercury-meteor-falling-to-earth-with-a-resounding-thud/
Maybe it’s the shape, but without flipping to a reference it looks like the Pontiac Tempest? Which to my understanding was about level in size if not positioning to the Comet; either way this was a very handsome derivative of the original styling themes.
Reminds me of a Checker.
As has been discussed before, the reason Edsel (probably) failed was the muddled marketing. As I read before on here, Edsel was originally launched as a means to equal the multi-divisional GM, but with muddled marketing at Mercury division and the same muddle at Edsel…it was a recipe to fail
Ironically, being the “individualist” I am, if I had been 26 in 1958 instead of only 6 I would have probably been a good customer for an Edsel. Being a Ford would even have been a plus. But Ford tried to get Edsel to run before it had even walked, much less crawled.
However, I can imagine with Chevy at one end and Pontiac at the other end of Edsel’s market niche, Ford had a huge challenge entering the market.
Edsel was probably seen as an “independent” by some prospective customers and independent car companies had a very tough time in the late 50s.
I don’t know quite what you mean by muddles marketing, but the low end Edsel was priced at the same level as the high end Ford (Fairlane 500). The high end of Edsel was priced in the high end of Mercury. There were four models, so the other two are more or less in the lower end of Mercury. I am not sure how the Edsel’s compare with the Fords or the Mercury’s, but if the only thing is a push button transmission control on the steering wheel, then why would anyone buy an Edsel?
Ford in some ways ran Edsel almost as its own independent company. They set up a dedicated line of dealerships and Edsel had unique engines and transmissions. The odd thing is the one place they intermixed Edsels with Fords & Mercurys was in manufacturing. Because Edsel had no dedicated plants, they suffered terribly in quality control.
Edsel was placed between Mercury & Ford and aimed at Pontiac & Dodge. GM had the same type of price overlap that Ford did.
Styling certainly hurt when the Edsel is viewed against the 1958 Pontiac.
Joe… Goos work, However, My first thought was ‘Checker”
There’s a bit of Triumph 2000 in there too, to me at least
Had to look that one up but the (circa) 1969 Triumph 2000 sure does share a strong resemblance.
I am the BIGGEST Edsel fan – and I don’t even own one yet! I was fascinated by the Edsel when I was around 13, and I was watching the end of a news program on T.V. It showcased an Edsel owner being interviewed, walking around his Edsel, knocking off small body parts and trim pieces, and having them fall into a bucket he was holding. Ever since, I was caught on to Ford’s “Charlie Brown” of the auto industry. So, to mention another Pontiac comparison years later, here is a brochure illustration of a 1970 Pontiac Bonneville. Hmmm…great minds think alike, no?
Unless a misprint, the Pacer used 1 quart oil in 4416 miles, The Corsair about 23 quarts in 4258 miles. That Turkey really gobble gobbled the oil! Happy Thanksgiving.
Source of inspiration for the Lagonda Rapide?
I was wondering when someone was going to post one of these. Absolutely.
One Edsel owner meets another in the parking lot and ask “which compaction did you win yours?”. Sales were so poor a lot were given away as prizes. Edsel also know as a Ford sucking a lemon or the car with a vagina for a grill !.
I have the consumer reports issue testing the Edsel bad bad bad one of the first things
they fussed about was the push buttons on the wheel things went downhill from there!
In the end the first LTD was the car the 1965 Edsel would’ve been.
The LTD was a move by Ford to bring out a car between Ford and Mercury. This move was checkmated by Chevrolet bringing out the Caprice.
A better comparison to the 68 Pontiac would be the 59 Edsel. They look like they were built by the same company 10 years apart.
Pontiac’s split grille began with the 1959 model year, and gradually evolves into the 1970 grille shown above or the earlier one shown in the article. I am doubtful that the Pontiac evolution had anything to do with the Edsel horse collar grille. Considering the fate of the Edsel, I would think designers would stay away from that style.
Well the earliest sketches had a lot of “Pontiac” about them. Again if only they went for the simpler designs….
http://edsel.net/prototype.html
At the time Roy Brown and Rob Jones were developing the vertical grille, there were plenty of European styling examples of how to handle the feature poorly, to wit:
And well, go classic all the way, including the flanking fender/headlight units:
I think that some people have hit the nail on the head with the Edsel name, and the styling. Edsel just doesn’t have the ring to it of a “must own car”, and the styling was perhaps a little too left of center to be really effective.
I must admit though, I didn’t know about how good of a performer that those engines were–the wedge shaped, polished combustion chamber was a great idea. The torque on those engines was tremendous.
Were those cars limited slip, like the original article says they would eventually be?
I agree about Edsel’s ring as a name for a car, but to be fair, I have always been perplexed that “Oldsmobile” had such a cachet going for it; I understand the strong product and all but as a Millennial, admittedly. it just had such an, I mean, old, sound to it!
The name made no difference. As you point out “Oldsmobile” worked for decades. A car’s brand name is built on the quality and styling of the brand, a “cool name” only goes so far.
I am the grandson of an Edsel owner. Sadly, there is little history of it, and no known photos.
Anecdotes:
Most likely a ’58, my mom recalls telling him this was the car he should get. She was 17 at the time.
Most likely a four door. Style and model difficult to determine. Deluxe enough that it had the Teletouch transmission, and he liked spiffy mid price cars. Let’s call it a Corsair four door hardtop.
He kept the key in a cool keepsake box. I have the key. Green background with the E logo on the key head. Perhaps in keeping with the green marketing theme noted in the article.
My folks had a hand-me-down visor caddy as shown in the article photos. It lacked an E logo as shown, so it may have been coincidence.
There is a photo showing he had a dealer model of the car. I’m pretty sure a ’58, so maybe that verifies he had a ’58.
The Teletouch was a reliability problem, and eventually they put in a floor shifter to bypass it.
He had a ’62 Buick LeSabre when I was very little. My guess is the Edsel only made it four years with him.
I think ford kind of revisited the Edsel design in 71 with the Galaxy
There’s a good chance the non-air conditioned 1958 Edsel Pacer two-door hardtop that Mr. and Mrs. Walt Woron drove back to Hollywood, California in late August and early September of 1957 wound up at Dennis Irving’s Baldwin Park Auto Parts in the early 1980’s. I found a press Pacer there with no evidence of having had air-conditioning and with most of its fancy warning light accessories already removed and the windshield broken out. I did still find the ultra-rare open door warning system intact, and snagged it plus the windshield gasket out of the car. The yard closed around 1983, and everything left was crushed.
I reach this conclusion because, according to a document I found in Edsel publicist C. Gayle Warnock’s files stored in a Detroit area library, of the five Pacers that came to California on that press demonstration run, only three were destined for Southern California. The other two went to the Bay Area. Of the three So-Cal-destined Edsels, one air conditioned car (Floyd Clymer’s) broke down in Kansas due to a missing oil pan plug and was replaced with a four-door hardtop. Of the other two, only one was air conditioned and that was Lew Oliver’s. Woron was the only southern California press member to be assigned a non-air conditioned car.
I LIVE FOR and LOVE this website. Period. However, I must say, I am very surprised that there are not more articles on the 1958 and 1959 Edsel’s. This car – FoMoCo’s Great Brainchild Idea to crush the upper-middle price market, was an utter disaster of Worldwide Proportions. And so it remains my Absolute Favourite. Poor Edsel. The unwanted, misunderstood child. My dream classic to own is a 1959 Edsel Corsair hardtop sedan. Why? Because (1) my Partner (who is an automechanic from the industry), tells me that domestic cars after 1958 are much easier to repair and maintain, and (2) it still has its unique vertical design motif. So, here is a photo of one. I have read that these are rare; only 1,694 were built – some even in the Oakville Plant in Ontario, Canada (my homeland). Anyone care to write an article on the 1959 Edsel hardtops?
(Oops. “auto mechanic” is two words. This website does not allow corrections.)
I missed this post the first time around. The illustrations in the “what will the Edsel be like?” piece were by Del Coates—who is still with us, still active and one of my fellow Western Automotive Journalists members.
MT’s drawings on p.40 look much better than the actual car (which the drawing on p.41 looked similar to).
A disproportion number of Edsels (compared to Fords and Mercurys of the same era, given their higher sales) seemed to have survived.
Seems that Studebaker – Packard was a big target for Edsel. My hometown Studebaker dealer took a franchise early. Still sold Studebaker though and continued until the end. Became a Dodge dealer after that. Here’s picture of his dealership I think late in 1957. http://edsel.net/dealer/harold%20osborne.jpg Looks like a 1958 Commander on the left and a C cab pickup in front of his store.
It’s funny nobody at Ford stopped to think things through. People wanting to ‘move up’ from a Ford are probably the sort who would probably want people to recognize, and approve their purchase. “You’ve done well” sort of thing, You’d get that automatically with an established brand. Dodge, yep. Oldsmobile, sure. Edsel – who?
With a new brand there’s a lot of advertising needed to ‘educate’ the public to see it as an upscale brand rather than just a flimflam job. And the product itself had better be demonstrably superior, to justify the price over the base Ford. The MT test Edsels clearly weren’t superior, and could well have turned people away from Ford’s products period.
But still…..
Nobody noticed or commented on the shared styling traits of the Edsel “nose” and the 1971-72 full sized Fords beak?