On Sep 6, 1:37 pm, (JLA)
wrote:
> A few pics in the Edsel Gallery here
>
> http://www.jlaforums.com/album.php?s...cond=descripti...
>
> http://www.jlaforums.com/album.php?s...cond=title&sor...
>
> From WP
>
> The idea for the Edsel came from Ford executives who were thinking
> about market niches when they should have been thinking about cars.
>
> They were worried that Ford owners who prospered in the postwar boom
> were trading in their cheap Fords for pricier Pontiacs and Buicks.
> They figured Ford needed a new line of medium-price cars, and they
> hired a bunch of motivational researchers to probe the psyche of the
> American car buyer.
>
> The '50s were the glory days of motivational research, and Columbia
> University's Bureau of Applied Social Research was the mecca of the
> trade. David Wallace, Ford's director of planning and a man with a
> PhD in sociology from Columbia, hired the bureau to find out why
> people bought the cars they bought. The bureau's researchers
> interviewed 800 people, inquiring about their preferences in
> everything from cars to cocktails, then produced a report revealing
> the hidden meaning of cars. Ford symbolized "rugged
> masculinity." Buick symbolized "upper class
> solidarity." Plymouth had a "weak image of plain
> respectability." And so on.
>
> Wallace read the report and concluded that the new Ford should be
> touted as "the smart car for the younger executive or
> professional family on its way up."
>
> That sounded reasonable. It was certainly better than touting it as a
> dumb car for families on the way down.
>
> Next, Wallace dispatched his researchers to find the perfect name for
> the nonexistent vehicle that Ford had dubbed the "E-car,"
> short for experimental car. The researchers buttonholed random
> Americans and asked then to blurt out their reactions to scores of
> possible names: Mars, Jupiter, Rover, Arrow, Dart, Ovation. The
> responses were tabulated and analyzed and the results were . . .
> inconclusive. So Wallace gathered a group of Ford executives in a
> room, turned out the lights and flashed scores of names at them. The
> results were . . . inconclusive.
>
> After that, Wallace did what any sensible American auto executive
> would do in such a situation: He wrote to Marianne Moore, America's
> most famous female poet, and asked her to suggest names. She did. She
> suggested lots of names -- Intelligent Whale, Intelligent Bullet,
> Bullet Cloisonne, Ford Faberge, Mongoose Civique and, the pi?ce de
> r?sistance, Utopian Turtletop.
>
> Wallace sent Moore a bouquet of roses and a card reading, "to our
> favorite turtletopper," but he did not choose any of her
> suggestions. Instead, Ford and its advertising agency, Foote, Cone
> & Belding, asked their employees to suggest names, promising
> a free "E-car" to the winner. The employees responded with
> 18,000 names. Among them was Edsel -- a tribute to Edsel Ford, who
> was the deceased son of Henry Ford, the company's legendary founder,
> and the father of Henry Ford II, the company's president.
>
> The folks at Foote, Cone & Belding whittled the 18,000-name
> list down to a mere 6,000 names and presented them to a committee
> headed by Richard Krafve, the man running the E-car project.
>
> "We don't want 6,000 names," Krafve grumbled. "We only
> want one."
>
> The Foote, Cone & Belding folks slunk back to their lair and
> whittled some more. On Nov. 8, 1956, they presented a list of 10
> names to a meeting of Ford's Executive Committee. The names included
> Corsair, Pacer, Ranger and Citation. The Executive Committee hated
> all of them. They grumbled for a while and finally Ernest Breech,
> Ford's chairman of the board, made the kind of instantaneous,
> intuitive decision touted in Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling 2005
> book, "Blink."
>
> "Why don't we just call it Edsel?" Breech said.
>
> It sounded like a question, but it was a command. Instantly, a
> gazillion hours of expensive and absurd motivational research went up
> in smoke.
>
> Why did Breech want to name the car Edsel?
>
> Ford's Edsel was the biggest bust in brand history. It didn't live up
> to the hype of its teaser ads and never gained the glamour of
> promotions such as this one for the 1958 Edsel Citation.
>
> Ford's Edsel was the biggest bust in brand history. It didn't live up
> to the hype of its teaser ads and never gained the glamour of
> promotions such as this one for the 1958 Edsel Citation.
>
> "He was brown-nosing Mr. Ford," says C. Gayle Warnock, now
> 91, who was the Edsel's public relations director. Warnock is also
> the author of the 1980 book "The Edsel Affair" and a
> forthcoming sequel, "The Rest of the Edsel Affair."
>
> When Warnock heard about Breech's decision, he banged out a
> one-sentence memo to Krafve: "We have just lost 200,000
> sales."
>
> "I knew nobody would like that name," he explains on the
> phone from his home in Sweetser, Ind. "When they did interviews
> [about names] and asked about Edsel, people always said, 'Did you say
> pretzel?' "
>
> Grilled to Imperfection
>
> Of course, a company launching a new car needs more than just an image
> and a name. It also needs, you know, a car.
>
> The Ford folks were working on that. In fact, they were building not
> one, not two, but 18 varieties of Edsel, including a convertible and
> a station wagon. Prices would range from $2,500 to $3,800 -- several
> hundred dollars more than comparable Fords.
>
> The designers came up with some interesting ideas. They created a
> push-button transmission and put it in the middle of the steering
> wheel, where most cars have a horn. And they fiddled with the front
> end: Where other cars had horizontal chrome grilles, the Edsel would
> have a vertical chrome oval in its grille. It was new! It was
> different!
>
> Unfortunately, it didn't work. It couldn't suck in enough air to cool
> the engine. So they had to make it bigger. And bigger.
>
> "They had to keep opening up that oval to get more air in
> there," says Jim Arnold, who was a trainee in Edsel's design
> shop. "And it didn't look as good."
>
> Edsel didn't have its own assembly lines, so the cars were produced in
> Ford and Mercury plants, which caused problems. Every once in a while,
> an Edsel would roll past workers who were used to Mercurys or other
> Fords. Confused, they sometimes failed to install all the parts
> before the Edsel moved on down the line.
>
> Cars without parts can be a problem, of course, but other aspects of
> the Edsel juggernaut worked perfectly -- the hype, for instance.
> Warnock and his PR team touted the glories of the cars, but wouldn't
> let anybody see them. They wouldn't even show pictures. When they
> finally released a photo, it turned out to be a picture of . . . the
> Edsel's hood ornament. And hundreds of publications actually printed
> it!
>
> In June 1957, three months before "E-Day," Newsweek
> published a story on the Edsel with a cover photo that showed just
> the right front wheel and a few inches of bumper.
>
> Edsel ads were everywhere, but before E-Day, they never showed the
> car. One ad pictured a stork holding a birth announcement for the
> Edsel. Another showed two ancient Fords, one saying,
> "Everybody's asking -- what's our grandchild going to look
> like?" and the other replying, "I'm not saying -- but
> there's never been a car like Edsel."
>
> Meanwhile, Warnock was giving friendly reporters sneak peeks at the
> car. "I let guys I trusted see the cars," he says.
> "I'd unlock a couple of doors and take them down dark hallways.
> It was showmanship, and it worked. They loved the cars and they said
> so. And the public could hardly wait to see it because I was getting
> so much publicity."
>
> Looking, Not Buying
>
> On E-Day, nearly 3 million Americans flocked to Ford showrooms to see
> the Edsel. Unfortunately, very few of them bought the Edsel.
>
> "They'd go in and look at it and leave," says Arnold.
>
> "We couldn't even get people to drive it," says Warnock.
> "They just didn't like the car. They just didn't like the front
> end."
>
> That weird oval grille soon became a running gag. Wags joked that it
> looked like a horse collar or a toilet seat. Time magazine said it
> made the car look like "an Olds sucking a lemon."
>
> But styling was hardly the worst problem. Oil pans fell off, trunks
> stuck, paint peeled, doors failed to close and the much-hyped
> "Teletouch" push-button transmission had a distressing
> tendency to freeze up. People joked that Edsel stood for "Every
> day something else leaks."
>
> Another major problem was caused by bad luck: The Edsel was an upscale
> car launched only a couple of months after a stock market plunge
> caused a recession. Sales of all premium cars plummeted.
>
> But the Edsel folks did not give up. No way. After months of sluggish
> sales, the crack PR team gathered to brainstorm ideas for selling
> Edsels. They were battered and weary and devoid of ideas until an
> adman named Walter "Tommy" Thomas blurted out a
> suggestion.
>
> "Let's give away a pony," he said.
>
> Much to Thomas's amazement, his idea was not only accepted, it was
> expanded. The geniuses at Edsel decided to advertise a promotion in
> which every Edsel dealer would give away a pony. It worked like this:
> If you agreed to test-drive an Edsel, your name would be entered into
> a lottery at the dealership, with the winner getting a pony.
>
> Ford bought 1,000 ponies and shipped them to Edsel dealers, who
> displayed them outside their showrooms. Many parents, egged on by
> their pony-loving children, traipsed in to take a test drive.
> Unfortunately, many of the lucky winners declined the ponies, opting
> instead for the alternative -- $200 in cash -- and soon dealers were
> shipping the beasts back to Detroit.
>
> Now the Edsel folks were not only stuck with a lot of cars they
> couldn't sell, they were also stuck with a lot of ponies they
> couldn't give away. The cars were easy enough to store, but the
> ponies required food. And after they ate the food, they digested the
> food. And then . . . another fine mess for Edsel.
>
> Before E-Day, Edsel's hypemeisters promised to sell 200,000 cars the
> first year. Actually, they sold 63,110. And it got worse. Sales
> dropped below 45,000 the second year. And only 2,846 of the 1960
> models sold before Ford pulled the plug.
>
> "The advertising talked about a remarkable new automobile, but it
> wasn't so remarkable or so new," says Angus MacKenzie, editor in
> chief of Motor Trend magazine. "The Edsel was just another
> chrome-laden land yacht of the era. There was nothing new other than
> the funny-looking grille and the name."
>
> To MacKenzie, there's a lesson in the Edsel debacle: "Market
> research has never created a great car," he says. "Great
> cars are the product of passion."
>
> The Collector
>
> Passion? Jim Popp pulses with passion for Edsels. He loves them,
> restores them, collects them. Popp has so many Edsels he can't count
> them.
>
> "I don't know the exact number," he says. "I've got
> half a car here, half a car there. Call it 40-ish."
>
> Popp is 66, retired from a Defense Department job he says he can't
> talk about, living in Davidsonville. Today, he's wearing a green
> T-shirt advertising Edsel's 50th anniversary. He points to the sign
> mounted on his huge multi-car garage. It shows the Edsel's famous
> oval grille beneath the words, "Shrine of the Holy Grill."
>
> Popp bought his first Edsel on Dec. 14, 1959, about a month after Ford
> announced the car's demise. He paid $2,300 for it -- the desperate
> dealer took $1,000 off the list price -- and he drove it for 17
> years.
>
> "It was a great car," he says. "Very few problems with
> it."
>
> He opens the door, steps inside the Shrine of the Holy Grill, flips on
> the lights. The huge room is packed with vintage cars, most of them
> Edsels. His first Edsel is there -- a tan 1960 sedan, lovingly
> restored to its original glory. There's also a red 1960 Edsel
> convertible. And a turquoise 1958 Edsel convertible. And a brown 1959
> Edsel sedan with a white top. They're all spotless and shiny and Popp
> is eager to show them off. But he's not about to take them out for a
> drive. No way.
>
> "They've crossed a philosophical line from mode of transportation
> to work of art," he says. "You wouldn't take the Mona Lisa
> and write your shopping list on it."
>
> Popp has a point. By strange quirk of financial fate, a restored Edsel
> is now far too valuable to use as an actual automobile. The car famous
> for its ugliness is now a rare and valued collector's item, like a
> Faberge egg.
>
> "First came the jokes, then the oblivion," Popp says,
> "and now it's resurrected with the collectors. It's one of the
> most popular cars for collectors."
>
> These days, a fully restored, spiffed-up, mint-condition Edsel can
> sell for $100,000 . And some of the rarest models, like the 1960
> convertible, can sell for $200,000, Popp says.
>
> Ironically, being the most famous flop in history is exactly what
> makes old Edsels so valuable.
>
> "People say, 'Isn't it a shame the Edsel didn't survive?' "
> Popp says, smiling. "I say, 'If it survived, it would just be
> another Ford.' "
>
> View the attachments for this post at:http://www.jlaforums.com/viewtopic.p...702396#9702396



I score this essay at C+.

It should have gone deeply into the recession of the period (Remember,
"You auto buy now?)

The vagina grille opening was not intended to be the main source of
cooling air, despite it being "obvious."
Most cars of the era were ugly, so that was another reason to just
wait a year. It took massive fins for Chevy to get up to speed the
next year, after the "melted clay" 1958 model. Lincoln was a
sculptered car, not a mild upgrade of the '57, which was a hash of the
beautiful '56.

GM did bring out the "flight deak" roofs on some of their models.
Caddy fins were bigger for all the good that did. Buick and Olds
sucked, with the upgrade rear fenders more reflective that a beauty
salon. Exners fins from Chrysler grew even bigger and had a nice rust
pocket on top of the front end. Studebaker had a Packard name on some
of their cars, which helped neither marque. Hudson/Nash were going no
where with their badge-engineering.

Hell, it would have been a bad year even without the depression.
Or were the '1958 car the cause of the depression?


Edsel was just a lousy cars aidst other ****ty cars. Had it had a
normal style and not ben hyped so, it might be around today.
Had there been no drepression, Eddel might have survived for a few
years,bu for what, just to follow DeSoto in 1962?