Last Sunday, I went for a bike ride…and went by a house that had an old Ford EDSEL in the driveway.This stirredmy memory…I know that the Edsel was a new car line put out by FORD in 1957-59, and has become a synonym for “marketing disaster”. But was it really all that bad a car? Just from looking at it, it did not look vastly dissimilar toother cars of its era. People tell me that the car had some big problems:
-it came with a huge 500 cubic inch engine…of course, gas was around 12 cents/gallon back then…butit was exceptionally thirsty!
-it was garishly decorated, with chrome and a weird-looking front grille desgin
-it came out at a time of recession (the “Eisenhower” recession of 1956)-and people were in no mood to buy new cars
-finally, it had many technical flaws…the push-button automatic transmission (with buttons on the steering column) had all kinds of problems. I also understand that the electrical wiring was bad-several brand-new Edsels caught fire and burned on dealers lots!
Anyway, the car was withdrawn from production, and the name “Edsel” dropped. Was it FORD’s biggrest disaster? 
Bad car? Not particularly. The stylists were perhaps a bit overenthusiastic and the timing was unlucky and maybe the name honoring Henry II’s dad (and a person who might have made Ford interesting had he lived) was a little too ethnic and, face it, ugly (though the alternatives were worse–Utopian Turtletop, anyone?), but it was not a BAD car by the standards of the day.
Ford’s biggest failure? But they’ve had so many, including keeping the Model T in production long past the point where it was seen as a reasonably modern and useable vehicle, crappy quality from the 50s through much of the 80s that gave the Japanese a foothold despite selling some decidedly quirkily styled cars themselves, and exploding Pintos and rolling Explorers. At least nobody got killed because an Edsel’s grille was different from a Buick’s.
It was never clear who they were marketing the car to, either. If someone wanted something bigger and fancier than a regular Ford sedan, there was the Lincoln sitting there. There was no real demand for a car in between those two. The Edsel was neither here nor there.
The grill styling was compared either to someone sucking on a lemon, or to female genitalia, depending upon whether there were children present.
Mechanically it was like other cars of the period. It was, however, a terribly expensive car to own as its resale value plummeted downward drastically and rapidly.
It had a reputation for build quality problems even worse than the typical car of the day, partly because Ford’s brilliant plan had an existing Mercury plant stop every hour or so and make an Edsel instead. Even by then, the marketing department’s lack of adult supervision had become notorious, even to the point of commissioning poet Marianne Moore to come up with some names. Her recommendations included “Utopian Turtletop” and “Resilient Bullet”. Their eventual choice of Edsel was based on the man’s reputation for general classiness (as well as obvious sucking up), but, since they were all in the Detroit “bubble”, they didn’t realize that elsewhere he was seen as just a suit with a silly name. They did have some good finalist names, like Ranger and Corsair, but those were used only as names for trim options.
And it isn’t that the car was all that ugly, agreed, but it was marketed as something unusually graceful and elegant compared to the run of the mill, and it obviously wasn’t.
Alan Sherman noted that the American automobile is a phallic symbol and the Edsel had a huge chrome-lined labia majora on the grille.
Is there any collector’s market for EDSEL cars today? The one I saw wasNOT in a good condition-It looked nearly 50 years old! Is there an association of EDSEL owners? I imagine that parts for these dogs must be pretty scarce-I don’t recall seeing any edsels at classic car meets.
Speaking as a minor authority on Ford products, I can say that the Edsel suffered from two things: Exceedingly high expectations, and a greater than average failure rate, even for the era. Parts stuck. Parts caught on fire. Parts just didn’t work. It was a glorious and shining hope, the equivalent of Ford saying they were going to make a Cadillac, and it kinda sucked. Also, it was ugly.