EDSEL How Not To Sell A Car

 

I  am amazed people still consider Henry Ford the greatest auto maker of all time, just because he sold fifteen million Model "T"'s.  That was the same, legendary vehicle which made Time magazine’s list of the fifty worst cars of all times; “…a piece of junk, the Yugo of its day.”  But even that was topped by the unmitigated disaster that was the Ford Edsel.

The Edsel wasn’t just a car. It was an entire new line of cars, originally conceived in 1954, to compete with General Motor’s entire Cadillac division. The chief designer on the project was a young Canadian named Roy Brown (above). Years later Brown told "The New Yorker" magazine, “Our goal was to create a vehicle which would be unique…and yet somehow familiar.”

The design team took ‘front on’ photos of the 19 other cars on the road at the time and realized that from a few hundred feet away they were indistinguishable from one another. But clay models of Brown’s original grill work were so graceful and delicate the engineers questioned how much fresh air would reach the radiator and cool the engine.

So Brown created what he called the “Horsecollar” (officially known as “the impact ring”), front and center. It reminded one critic of “a vagina with teeth”. In fact, while the design still existed only in clay, a prankster taped fur in-between the front grill work which left it, according to Robin Jones, then a young Ford designer, looking like “…a hormonally disturbed cow after giving birth”. 

Kinder critics said it resembled “an Oldsmobile sucking on a lemon”, or just “a toilet seat”.

Looking for the perfect name Ford hired one of the largest advertising companies in the world, Foote, Cone and Belding, (“Successful Advertising is Only a Foote Away”). They offered up 6,000 possible names (including the “Mongoose Civique” and the “Utopian Turtletop”). Growled one Ford executive, “We hired them to come up with a name. They came up with six thousand.” Finally, after months of searching in vain, they settled calling their new line of automobiles as “The Ford Edsel”.

Edsel Ford (above, left) was a civilized, cultured, talented and intelligent man who was also a skilled car maker and favorite son of old man Henry Ford (above, right). And suffice it to say that if Edsel hadn’t died of a heart attack from overwork in 1943 there would never have been a Ford automobile carrying his name because Edsel Ford knew too much about marketing to have ever allowed that. 

When Ford’s Public Relations chief, C. Gayle Warnock, was presented with the name "Edsel" he claims to have said, “We have just lost 200,000 in sales”.

They financed the Edsel with the infusion of cash they got by going public in 1957, and from the success of the new Thunderbird. But at the last minute they decided to start pinching pennies. Rather than establish a brand new production line, management chose to assemble Edsels on the same Kentucky production lines used to make Lincolns and Mercurys, and at the same time. 

The assembly line workers and plant management both saw the Edsel as an intrusion into their regular work schedules,  and the results were perfectly predictable. And the "mistakes" which slipped through the quality control were not helped by the advertising campaign.

Ford chose a mystery introduction for the Edsel. New cars were shipped wrapped in fabric, and the 1,160 brand new Edsel dealers were strictly instructed to keep the cars under wraps on their lots until “E” day, which was supposed to be Wednesday, 4  September 1957.

However, a used car dealer in Cleveland, Ohio had an unwrapped Edsel on display two days early. That got national press coverage. So much for the surprise

Meanwhile a $2 million advertising campaign ($14.5 million in 2007 dollars) began by showing only the hood ornament, or just blurry shots of speeding Edsels, and drawings of draped cars on transporters, always with the taunting tag lines, “The new Edsel is coming!” or "The New Edsel is on its way".

Finally, on Friday night, 13 September, during the premier on CBS of the “Edsel Show” - staring Bing Crosby....

...with guest stars Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Louis Armstrong, Bob Hope and the Four Preps...

...an announcer, spoke in warm, golden tones; “And now for the moment I'm sure you've all been looking forward to, a look at the newest member of the Ford family of fine cars ... the Edsel!" It was supposed to be the greatest advertising buildup since Moses came down off the mountain. 

But like Moses, it was all downhill from there - one stumble and slide after another.

The dealers' showrooms were full of people, but few customers. Ford had expected to sell 2 million Edsel the first year. They only sold half a million. What went wrong?

Stumble Number One was that between August of 1957 and February of 1958 American industrial output declined by 10%. During the same six months unemployment jumped by two million. Retail sales dropped 2% and so did take home pay. The recession was bad enough that it gave Democrats a majority in the House in 1958, and set up Kennedy’s win of the White House in 1960. In short, this was not the time to introduce a new line of expensive high end automobiles.

Stumble Number Two; there were a few small problems with the cars. The much ballyhooed "Vac-U Start" feature displayed a dangerous tendency to restart the car after you had turned the engine off and walked away. And the “Teletouch” push button transmission shifter, located in the center of the steering wheel, was so new and so secret that none of the dealers knew how to service it.

And then there was the famous hood ornament, featured in so many advertisements. When the big V8 engine was pulling the Edsel at over seventy miles an hour (which it easily could do) the hood ornament had a nasty tendency to come flying off and turn into shrapnel.

Stumble Number Three was that many Edsels left the factories with wrong or missing parts: wires had been incorrectly connected and an occasional transmission had been installed backwards. And many of those Edsels which did start prompted dissatisfied owners to claim that Edsel stood for “Every Day Something Else Leaks”. (Decades later, when Ford failed to respond quickly to the invasion of well made inexpensive Japanese cars, the name Ford was said to stand for “Found On Road, Dead”).

Stumble Number Four was that Ford had introduced the 1958 Edsel in September of 1957 instead of October, the standard practice at the time, so the Edsells were competing with other Ford products being sold at 1957 inventory closeout prices.

And then there was the advertising blitz; Stumble Number Five. As one observer noted, although customers had been primed to expect a “…plutonium-powered, pancake-making wonder car…” what they were being offered was a “…kind of homely, fuel thirsty and too expensive…” car." The American public simply didn't want this automobile. They didn't hate it.  They just didn't want it.

Overnight the Edsel went from wonder kid to village idiot. In 1958, while riding in a brand new Edsel, a  crowd in Peru pelted Vice President Richard Nixon with eggs. He would quip, “They were not attacking me. They were attacking the car.”

By 1961 on the Andy Griffith Show when Deputy Barney Fife bought a lemon of a used car, it simply had to be an Edsel convertible. 

The audience was laughing even before the steering wheel slowly projected itself into Barney’s face. The Edsel had become “…an agglomeration (sic) of everything the public had grown tired of…vulgar ostentation and superfluous (sic) size…”.

By November of 1959, after building 110,847 Edsels and losing $350 million ($2 and 1/2 billion in 2007 dollars), and even redesigning the "vagina with teeth" front grill,  Ford surrendered, and stopped production of the Edsel. And a legend was born.

Three years later Ford would introduce the Mustang, a car designed to fit what the customer wanted, rather than a car design looking for a customer, which was what the Edsel had been.

Today less than 6,000 Edsels survive. But until his death in 2013, Roy Brown, the designer of the “vagina with teeth”, insisted with a straight face, “The car is a complete success as far as I'm concerned." And that kind of thinking is what is wrong with Detroit, today.

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