It was fifty years ago today—September 4, 1957—that the Ford Motor Company launched an automotive brand that would become synonymous with grand-scale corporate failure: Edsel. After a period of intense secrecy and unprecedented hype, the Edsel lineup at last made its showroom debut on a Wednesday the company dubbed “E-Day.” But the cars themselves could never live up to the marketing ballyhoo. By most accounts, Edsels were quite pleasant by late-Fifties standards, but that wasn’t enough. Ford had promised something entirely new: The Edsel was to have been the new high-water mark for American automotive style, craftsmanship, and technology. The cars—the full-sized Citation and Corsair models, the mid-sized Ranger and Pacer, and the Bermuda, Villager, and Roundup station wagons—proved altogether unexceptional. The cars’ look, once famously described as “an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon,” earned a limp reception from car-shoppers; quality issues plagued the cars during their first year (e.g., pundits suggested the name was an acronym for Every Day Something Else Leaks); and despite some clever features, such as the available TeleTouch push-button automatic transmission, the Edsels brought no significant degree of innovation to the market. And then there was that name. Honoring Edsel Ford, the only child of Henry Ford and the president of the Ford Motor Company from 1919 to 1943, the Edsel name reminded shoppers of such less-than-flattering words as “weasel” and “pretzel.” It was all too much.
By the end of 1959, the Edsel brand was dead.
So what have we learned from Corporate America's grandest failure, fifty years on? Does the Edsel’s cautionary tale still resonate? Maybe not so much. In the 1980s, Ford itself hyped a European-import nameplate called Merkur, only to euthanize it five years later, and then repeated the feat a few years later with a brand of electric vehicles called TH!NK. Then there’s Apple's unloved Newton, Coca-Cola's nasty "New" formula, Microsoft's befuddling "Bob," Volkswagen's $100,000 Phaeton...
For everything you'd care to know about Ford's magnificent failure, visit www.edsel.com.
