Ford’s spectacular flop

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33804, 29 March 1975, Page 11

Ford’s spectacular flop

(By

SIMON MARSH)

One spring afternoon 20 years ago, two dozen top executives of Ford of America trooped into a small room in the firm’s Detroit styling centre and took their seats around a curtaindraped car.

Suddenly the veil was whipped away. According to eye-witnesses, the audience sat in total silence for What seemed a minute. Then, as one man, it burst into a round of wild applause. This unprecedented reaction heralded the first showing of a sleek, dynamic-looking car which was to become the most spectacular flop in the history of big business. Its name was the Edsel.

Today, with the world motor-trade looking over its shoulder at the dark clouds of possible recession, the lessons of the Edsel stand as a grisly warning of what can happen when optimism gets the better of business instinct.

There are now said to be less than 500 original Edsels in existence out of the 100,000 that rolled from the production lines during the car’s four-year life-span. And by the time the project was scrapped in November, 1959, the Edsel had lost its maker an unprecedented £2OO million, and fallen with a crash that resounded throughout the world

Nowadays, only the Edsel Enthusiasts’ Club has

any time for the huge chrome-dripping monster that was planned to change the face of motoring, but Which succeeded only in losing more money than any other car in the industry’s history. To this day, no-one really knows why. The whole weight of the Ford empire was thrown behind the idea, providing teams of psychiatrists to endow the car with a “personality,” and the best research and development facilities throughout its three years of creation. A total of 18,000 names were examined and rejected before Edsel was chosen. Yet still it failed. . . . It certainly was not through lack of thoroughness: a committee spent two years compiling a sixvolume market forecast, and researchers sought out the sort of man who would buy the car.

They even studied the cocktail-mixing ability of potential customers — just to get a broad picture! In 1955, the motor industry was in an uncannily similar position to today’s firms: they needed a medium price car which was good-looking and economical, and in the autumn of 1954 Ford gave the goahead for what was known as the E-Car. The brief was simple: it must be a car that would shake the world.

By February, the designs were finished. The most striking aspect was a novel, horse-collar shaped radiator grille set vertically in the centre of a low wide frontend.

At the back it had sprouted horizontal wings—a stark contrast to the huge vertical tail-fins then dominating the market. Everyone who saw the Edsel was convinced it was a winner, but finding the right name was a major problem. It had to fit the image that the industrial psychologists had laboriously constructed: "The smart car for the younger executive or professional family on its way up.” After examining the 18,000 suggestions, including some from the poet, Marianne Moore, a consulting committee finally picked the one they had thought of at the very beginning — the name of Henry Ford the First’s son.

That day, switchboard girls began greeting callers with “Edsel Division.” By the next morning, workmen had hoisted a huge neon name-sign on the factory roof. The Edsel was in business . . .

The day the car was unveiled to the public, two million people flocked to see it. Thousands were sold on the first day. The press liked the car — “a handsome hard-punching newcomer” was among phrases used. For a few weeks sales rose high, it looked as though the vast production and launching costs had been justified. Then came the first ominous warnings. As cars remained unsold and stocks piled up, Henry Ford II appeared on closedcircuit television to assure dealers that “the Edsel was here to stay." But a year later he’d obviously thought again.

By now, the Edsel was the black sheep of the Ford flock, neglected and rarely advertised. And early in 1959, four years after the launch, it disappeared. What went wrong with the Ford wonder-car? One explanation is that the Edsel was a victim of the time-lag between the decision to produce a car and the act of putting it on the market. In between conception and introduction, the sudden popularity of the really small car had turned the automobile status ladder upside down. As one writer put it: “The Edsel was the classic case of the wrong car for the wrong market at the wrong time.” Another reason was that the motoring press, once the publicity dazzle of the launch had faded, began to find things wrong with the car. Some of the tested models apparently rattled more than they should. Some writers said they were overpowered . . . others complained of just the opposite.

One thing was certain, the Edsel could now do nothing right. There was only one road left for it to travel. And that was straight to the breaker’s yard.

Yet the monumental failure of the project surely boils down to this: that there’s simply no accounting for taste. Motor magnates may loom large, but 20 years ago, as today, it was the little man with the downpayment who had the final and decisive word.