Blunder Buses: Ford Edsel

The key, it turned out, was to use a trio of core bodies and chassis through the five-marque line-up, differentiation between brands achieved through individual nose and tail styling, wheelbase stretches and the canny use of décor. Huge economies of scale were achieved, without it being too obvious in the showroom. Another secret was GM’s cost centre method of managing departments, each of these responsible for meeting its own expense and profit targets. Ford copied this, too.

Breech cannily deployed the Whiz Kids individually through the company rather than as a team, prompting three to leave. But seven remained, one of them Robert McNamara, who would eventually become a (controversial) US Defense Secretary. A highly rational man who could not understand why anyone would spend more than was absolutely necessary on a new car, he would do much to ensure that the Edsel lived a short life. Although he needn’t have made much effort; the Edsel was cursed with plenty of impediments before it was even launched.

Yet the need for it – or something mid-market – was obvious, and reconfirmed by Jack Davis, another Whiz Kid. His 1952 comparison of Ford’s market coverage versus the competition not unexpectedly concluded that the company needed to add a mid-market model to supplement the Mercury offering. The task of realising this was given to the Lincoln-Mercury division, then run by Henry Ford II’s brother Benson, who in turn gave the job to his immediate assistant, ex-management consultant Richard Krafve. He determined that, sensibly enough, this new car should be marketed by the existing Lincoln-Mercury division and its dealer network.

At which point one Lewis D Crusoe intervened with a grand vision. Crusoe had come from GM with Breech and was now considered the third most powerful operator within Ford. In his view, what the company actually needed to compete – and mirror the shape of his former employer – was a brand-new division, with a new nameplate, a new logo and a new dealer network.

His protégé, Whiz Kid Jack Reith, was to direct a new task force to work out the detail, and win over the board. Reith had just returned from France, where he had successfully managed to restore Ford’s struggling French division to profit, and offload it to French manufacturer Simca. His star was flying high.

The grander Crusoe-Reith ambition won the day and the new E division – for experimental – was born on 19 November 1956. Oddly, given that it was Reith’s effort that had launched it, the project was headed by Krafve, who had initially resisted so grand a plan. So did McNamara, who asked to be counted out of the project, concentrating instead on stretching and adding value to the Ford’s basic mid-1950s Mainline model to create the mid-market nibbling Fairlane. Tellingly, the Fairlane enjoyed just the kind of success that Henry Ford had been looking for, and for minimal investment. Reith, meanwhile, became head of a newly independent Mercury, distancing himself from the E division should it bomb.

Although the American public was expecting anything but that. Listen to Ford talking about the brand-new car it was cooking up in the mid-1950s, you could easily believe that it was well on the way to reinventing the motor car. ‘Lately, some mysterious automobiles have been seen on the roads,’ headlined an ad featuring a blurry, camouflaged silhouette travelling at speed. The copy talked of the Edsel being ‘one of the best-tested, best-proved cars in automobiling history’. This ad and others milking the mystery of the new Edsel were the culmination of a two-year PR campaign suggesting that Ford was on the threshold of announcing something truly revolutionary.

Perhaps it had hydraulic suspension, like the Citroën DS, launched to collective astonishment two years earlier, or a radically aerodynamic design, with automatically tinting glass and a jet engine. Don’t laugh – in 1957, Ford unveiled a concept called the Nucleon, a fission-powered machine that would doubtless have had its occupants glowing with excitement.

What buyers actually got – and there were rather fewer than Ford had hoped, despite its publicity drive herding an astonishing 2.85 million of the curious into new Edsel showrooms – was a reheated mix of the Fords and Mercurys that Dearborn had already been selling. Engines, chassis, transmissions and much else were already familiar, which was how production of the Edsel was squeezed onto production lines making Fords and Mercurys. Of which more shortly.

Not only was there disappointment at the lack of a wheeled revolution, but also disquiet at a front end dominated by a vertical grille variously likened to an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon and a horse collar – and those are just the repeatable ones. Yet like much of the decision-making behind the Edsel, this had a logic behind it. The vertical grille was the result of designer Roy Brown realising that every contemporary car on the road had what was in essence a horizontal grille, even if this was elaborately sculpted. Giving the Edsel a vertical grille would provide the distinctiveness he’d been ordered to create, despite being forced to use the core bodyshells of existing Fords and Mercurys.

His original sketches were vastly more appealing than the end result. The car’s nose was reverse raked, like a 1960s BMW’s, and it was bisected by a narrow, prow-like vertical grille complemented by subtle quarter bumpers and slender air intakes. One front-end proposal had a racy, clean-sculpted aura of subtle menace that promised much. But the engineering department was unimpressed. With so narrow a grille the car would overheat, it said, ordering it to be widened, eventually to the point of ugliness. The same process of light, spoiling modifications eventually produced a car that mixed the banal with the striking – but for the wrong reasons.

While Brown, who would later design the Mk1 Ford Cortina, toiled over the E project’s look, one David Wallace, a sociologist who had entered the corporate world, had to find a name. It was to be a painful process. Ford had used research to whittle a list of 5000 names to produce the much-liked Thunderbird badge, and wanted to use the same process for the E-car. Wallace thought he would use a more adventurous method, enlisting the help of Marianne Moore, a fashionable Brooklyn poet.

Wallace drew her in with a beautifully written appeal for help, which Moore provided with enthusiasm. So began one of the most literary exchanges of correspondence ever witnessed in the car industry, Moore submitting six letters packed with thoughts, invariably outlandish, to the conservative car world. Moore renounced any fee: ‘My fancy would be inhibited by acknowledgement in advance of performance’, she wrote, which was just as well – Mongoose Civique, Andante con Moto, Resilient Bullet and The Impeccable were all among the rejects, as was the Utopian Turtletop of her final suggestions.

Meanwhile an ad agency produced a staggering 18,000 possibilities, culling these to 6000, then to 400 and finally to a list on a single sheet of paper. In November 1956 the Ford Executive Committee met to decide, but liked none of the front runners, even Corsair, Citation, Pacer and Ranger, all of which had done well in market research. Breech reckoned it should be Edsel after Henry Ford’s only son, president of the family firm until his death in 1943. Despite the Ford family’s objections, Breech managed to persuade Henry Ford II to accept the Edsel name against his better judgement.

If Edsel was mildly sub-optimal, the method for producing the car was worse. In theory, its mechanical similarity to Mercurys and Fords should have made it cheap to make, because it could be sent down the same production lines. Which it was, initially at the rate of one extra car per hour. Each assembly line operative had 59 seconds to complete their task, but the introduction of an extra car reduced that time. Its presence was resented by both workers and plant managers, poor quality the result.

Some cars left the line unfinished, the unattached parts left in the boot with instructions for unsuspecting dealers, while others simply left the plant without the parts at all. Yet quality and durability were supposed to be key qualities of the Edsel, as that ad with a camouflaged car implied. Just as bad, and just as surprising given all the analysis behind the Edsel’s birth, was its messy positioning within the greater Ford range.

Instead of slotting it above Mercury and below Lincoln, Mercury was moved upmarket, allowing Edsel to slide below. Though not enough, meaning the price overlap was considerable. Customers thus had to learn not only that there was a new Ford Motor Company marque, but also that an existing brand was to become more expensive. These niceties were not all the prospective Edsel buyer had to navigate.

At launch there were 18 Edsels that mixed multiple two- and four-door saloons, hardtops and estates, plus convertibles, together with Ranger, Pacer, Corsair, Bermuda and Citation nameplates. You’ll note that four of these names were in Wallace’s final shortlist, his efforts thus not totally wasted.

To give it the best possible launch, programme leader Krafve launched the Edsel one month ahead of the usual new model year introduction date to get a headstart. But that pitted the Edsel against the blow-out prices of last year’s models, making it look expensive, and when those cars were gone sales still failed to pick up. One unforeseen reason was a mini-recession, which temporarily shrank the mid-size market. Buyers wanted economy cars. Couple this to its mesmerizingly ugly front-end, the confused market positioning, the disappointing reality of its unrevolutionary essence and that it kept going wrong, and Ford had a disaster on its hands. Increasingly desperate efforts to attract buyers – one such was to have every dealer stable a pony to entertain the kids – did little to help.

Instead of the target 200,000 to 300,000 sales, 68,045 found homes in the US and Canada in its 1958 launch year with some models, such as the two-door Roundup station wagon, managing under 1000 units. For 1959 Edsel was decisively repositioned beneath Mercury, as it should have been in the first place, the line-up pruned with minor restyling. Sales nevertheless fell to 47,396 before crashing to 2846 for the following year, the nameplate killed just a month after the 1960 editions, with a conventional grille, had been announced.

McNamara’s Fairlane strategy had proven right, his desire to kill the car, which, incredibly, he had mentioned to an ad executive on the evening of its launch, fulfilled. The closure of Edsel cost many dealers dear, as it did the car’s buyers, residual values being quite terrible – nobody wants to drive a failure. And after such a mammoth publicity drive, it was not long before the whole nation knew. In today’s money, Ford lost £3 billion on a venture that until the wildly successful Mustang appeared four years later, turned its product planning timid.

There have been various moments since when Ford has attempted to fill out its brand offering, most notably with the Premier Automobile Group of Aston Martin, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lincoln and Volvo. But while Lincoln survives the others have gone, the company perhaps pathologically unable to successfully manage more than a couple of marques.