Edsel

Edsel, an automobile (1958–60) whose name commemorates Henry Ford’s son, Edsel (1893–1943), who had been the much loved and appreciated president of the Ford Motor Company from 1919 until his death at age 49. Edsel Ford’s three sons objected to the use of their father’s name, and indeed Ford conducted extensive market research and gathered more than 8,000 possible names before settling on Edsel—a name once popular but now all but vanished from American culture, except as a synonym for failure.

(Read Henry Ford’s 1926 Britannica essay on mass production.)

The Edsel was the product of a new division within the Ford Motor Company created to compete with General Motors’ mid-priced Oldsmobile. Planned in the mid-1950s’ flash flood of optimistic consumerism in an era in which millions of new cars were purchased each year, it was developed with deliberate secrecy. Not even official Edsel dealers were allowed to see it in advance; but the pre-launch marketing blitz promised something revolutionary that Ford just could not deliver. Bad timing (the United States was entering a recession, and the market turned to more fuel-efficient vehicles such as the American Motor Company’s Rambler), ineffective marketing, flawed design, a high purchase price, and poor workmanship invited what business academics call “consumer blowback” after the Edsel was formally introduced on September 4, 1957. The public had been teased into expecting nothing less than a “plutonium-powered, pancake-making supercar.” Instead, the entry-level Edsel appeared to be little different from an ordinary Ford Mercury with a front “horse collar” grille described by Time magazine as looking “like a midwife’s view of labor and delivery”; others said it resembled a toilet seat. The Edsel also suffered from indistinct brand recognition: four sedans and three station wagons were put on the market, some with only subtle differences between them.

Disappointment mushroomed in direct proportion to public anticipation, and post-launch incompetence merely compounded the fiasco. In the rush to meet launch deadlines, cars were shipped incompletely or wrongly assembled—and with no customer loyalty to fall back on, the brand was born into its own death spiral of recrimination and closed dealerships. The product line was trimmed in 1959 and Ford pushed hard to popularise the Edsel, sponsoring, for instance, a television special called The Edsel Show, hosted by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Even so, total sales reached only some 110,000 over the brand’s lifetime. Edsel survived just 26 months and cost the Ford Motor Company upwards of $350 million (about $3.6 billion in 2023 dollars). It was discontinued at the direction of Robert S. McNamara, an executive soon to leave Ford and become John F. Kennedy’s secretary of defense, and the Edsel emerged as a point of contention in the 1964 presidential campaign when Barry M. Goldwater placed blame directly on McNamara, continuing in his post in the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson, for the Edsel’s failure.

In 1958, Vice President Richard Nixon rode in a convertible Edsel through Lima, Peru. When his motorcade was pelted with eggs, he quipped, “They were throwing eggs at the car, not me.”

The Edsel was not the only victim of economic downturn and the quest for less expensive vehicles; Chrysler’s DeSoto, launched in 1928, was similarly terminated in 1961. And although a byword for failure, the Edsel, with few working vehicles still on the road, has become a prized collector’s item.