by John Brooks
It is a tribute of sorts to the men who gave the Edsel its big buildup that although cars tending to rattle, balk, and fall apart into shiny heaps of junk kept coming off the assembly lines, things didn’t go badly at first. Doyle says that on Edsel Day more than 6,500 Edsels were either ordered by or actually delivered to customers. That was a good showing, but there were isolated signs of resistance. For instance, a New England dealer selling Edsels in one showroom and Buicks in another reported that two prospects walked into the Edsel showroom, took a look at the Edsel, and placed orders for Buicks on the spot.
In the next few days, sales dropped sharply, but that was to be expected once the bloom was off. Automobile deliveries to dealers—one of the important indicators in the trade—are customarily measured in ten-day periods, and during the first ten days of September, on only six of which the Edsel was on sale, it racked up 4,095; this was lower than Doyle’s first-day figure because many of the initial purchases were of models and color combinations not in stock, which had to be factory-assembled to order. The delivery total for the second ten-day period was off slightly, and that for the third was down to just under 3,600. For the first ten days of October, nine of which were business days, there were only 2,751 deliveries—an average of just over three hundred cars a day. In order to sell the 200,000 cars per year that would make the Edsel operation profitable the Ford Company would have to move an average of between six and seven hundred each business day—a good many more than three hundred a day. On the night of Sunday, October 13th, Ford put on a mammoth television spectacular for Edsel, pre-empting the time ordinarily allotted to the Ed Sullivan show, but though the program cost $400,000 and starred Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, it failed to cause any sharp spurt in sales. Now it was obvious that things were not going at all well.
Among the former executives of the Edsel Division, opinions differ as to the exact moment when the portents of doom became unmistakable. Krafve feels that the moment did not arrive until sometime late in October. Wallace, in his capacity as Edsel’s pipe-smoking semi-Brain Truster, goes a step further by pinning the start of the disaster to a specific date—October 4th, the day the first Soviet sputnik went into orbit, shattering the myth of American technical pre-eminence and precipitating a public revulsion against Detroit’s fancier baubles. Public Relations Director Warnock maintains that his barometric sensitivity to the public temper enabled him to call the turn as early as mid-September; contrariwise, Doyle says he maintained his optimism until mid-November, by which time he was about the only man in the division who had not concluded it would take a miracle to save the Edsel. “In November,” says Wallace, sociologically, “there was panic, and its concomitant—mob action.” The mob action took the form of a concerted tendency to blame the design of the car for the whole debacle; Edsel men who had previously had nothing but lavish praise for the radiator grille and rear end now went around muttering that any fool could see they were ludicrous. The obvious sacrificial victim was Brown, whose stock had gone through the roof at the time of the regally accoladed debut of his design, in August, 1955. Now, without having done anything further, for either better or worse, the poor fellow became the company scapegoat. “Beginning in November, nobody talked to Roy,” Wallace says. On November 27th, as if things weren’t bad enough, Charles Kreisler, who as the only Edsel dealer in Manhattan provided its prize showcase, announced that he was turning in his franchise because of poor sales, and it was rumored that he added, “The Ford Motor Company has laid an egg.” He thereupon signed up with American Motors to sell its Rambler, which, as the only domestic small car then on the market, was already the possessor of a zooming sales curve. Doyle grimly commented that the Edsel Division was “not concerned” about Kreisler’s defection.
By December, the panic at Edsel had abated to the point where its sponsors could pull themselves together and begin casting about for ways to get sales moving again. Henry Ford II, manifesting himself to Edsel dealers on closed-circuit television, urged them to remain calm, promised that the company would back them to the limit, and said flatly, “The Edsel is here to stay.” A million and a half letters went out over Krafve’s signature to owners of medium-priced cars, asking them to drop around at their local dealers and test-ride the Edsel; everyone doing so, Krafve promised, would be given an eight-inch plastic scale model of the car, whether he bought a full-size one or not. The Edsel Division picked up the check for the scale models—a symptom of desperation indeed, for under normal circumstances no automobile manufacturer would make even a move to outfumble its dealers for such a tab. (Up to that time, the dealers had paid for everything, as is customary.) The division also began offering its dealers what it called “sales bonuses,” which meant that the dealers could knock anything from one hundred to three hundred dollars off the price of each car without reducing their profit margin. Krafve told a reporter that sales up to then were about what he had expected them to be, although not what he had hoped they would be; in his zeal not to seem unpleasantly surprised, he appeared to be saying that he had expected the Edsel to fail. The Edsel’s advertising campaign, which had started with studied dignity, began to sound a note of stridency. “Everyone who has seen it knows—with us—that the Edsel is a success,” a magazine ad declared, and in a later ad this phrase was twice repeated, like an incantation: “The Edsel is a success. It is a new idea—a YOU idea—on the American Road.… The Edsel is a success.” Soon the even less high-toned but more dependable advertising themes of price and social status began to intrude, in such sentences as “They’ll know you’ve arrived when you drive up in an Edsel” and “The one that’s really new is the lowest-priced, too!” In the more rarefied sectors of Madison Avenue, a resort to rhymed slogans is usually regarded as an indication of artistic depravity induced by commercial necessity.
From the frantic and costly measures the Edsel Division took in December, it garnered one tiny crumb: for the first ten-day period of 1958, it was able to report, sales were up 18.6 percent over those of the last ten days of 1957. The catch, as the Wall Street Journal alertly noted, was that the latter period embraced one more selling day than the earlier one, so, for practical purposes, there had scarcely been a gain at all. In any case, that early-January word of meretricious cheer turned out to be the Edsel Division’s last gesture. On January 14, 1958, the Ford Motor Company announced that it was consolidating the Edsel Division with the Lincoln-Mercury Division to form a Mercury-Edsel-Lincoln Division, under the management of James J. Nance, who had been running Lincoln-Mercury. It was the first time that one of the major automobile companies had lumped three divisions into one since General Motors’ merger of Buick, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac back in the depression, and to the people of the expunged Edsel Division the meaning of the administrative move was all too clear. “With that much competition in a division, the Edsel wasn’t going anywhere,” Doyle says. “It became a stepchild.”
FOR the last year and ten months of its existence, the Edsel was very much a stepchild—generally neglected, little advertised, and kept alive only to avoid publicizing a boner any more than necessary and in the forlorn hope that it might go somewhere after all. What advertising it did get strove quixotically to assure the automobile trade that everything was dandy; in mid-February an ad in Automotive News had Nance saying,
Since the formation of the new M-E-L Division at Ford Motor Company, we have analyzed with keen interest the sales progress of the Edsel. We think it is quite significant that during the five months since the Edsel was introduced, Edsel sales have been greater than the first five months’ sales for any other new make of car ever introduced on the American Road.… Edsel’s steady progress can be a source of satisfaction and a great incentive to all of us.
Nance’s comparison, however, was almost meaningless, no new make ever having been introduced anything like so grandiosely, and the note of confidence could not help ringing hollow.
It is quite possible that Nance’s attention was never called to a
n article by S. I. Hayakawa, the semanticist, that was published in the spring of 1958 in ETC: A Review of General Semantics, a quarterly magazine, under the title, “Why the Edsel Laid an Egg.” Hayakawa, who was both the founder and the editor of ETC, explained in an introductory note that he considered the subject within the purview of general semantics because automobiles, like words, are “important … symbols in American culture,” and went on to argue that the Edsel’s flop could be attributed to Ford Company executives who had been “listening too long to the motivation-research people” and who, in their efforts to turn out a car that would satisfy customers’ sexual fantasies and the like, had failed to supply reasonable and practical transportation, thereby neglecting “the reality principle.” “What the motivation researchers failed to tell their clients … is that only the psychotic and the gravely neurotic act out their irrationalities and their compensatory fantasies,” Hayakawa admonished Detroit briskly, and added, “The trouble with selling symbolic gratification via such expensive items as … the Edsel Hermaphrodite … is the competition offered by much cheaper forms of symbolic gratification, such as Playboy (fifty cents a copy), Astounding Science Fiction (thirty-five cents a copy), and television (free).”
Notwithstanding the competition from Playboy, or possibly because the symbol-motivated public included people who could afford both, the Edsel kept rolling—but just barely. The car moved, as salesmen say, though hardly at the touch of a toothpick. In fact, as a stepchild it sold about as well as it had sold as a favorite son, suggesting that all the hoopla, whether about symbolic gratification or mere horsepower, had had little effect one way or the other. The new Edsels that were registered with the motor-vehicle bureaus of the various states during 1958 numbered 34,481—considerably fewer than new cars of any competing make, and less than one-fifth of the 200,000 a year necessary if the Edsel was to show a profit, but still representing an investment by motorists of over a hundred million dollars. The picture actually brightened in November, 1958, with the advent of the Edsel’s second-year models. Shorter by up to eight inches, lighter by up to five hundred pounds, and with engines less potent by as much as 158 horsepower, they had a price range running from five hundred to eight hundred dollars less than that of their predecessors. The vertical grille and the slant-eyed rear end were still there, but the modest power and proportions persuaded Consumer Reports to relent and say, “The Ford Motor Company, after giving last year’s initial Edsel model a black eye, has made a respectable and even likable automobile of it.” Quite a number of motorists seemed to agree; about two thousand more Edsels were sold in the first half of 1959 than had been sold in the first half of 1958, and by the early summer of 1959 the car was moving at the rate of around four thousand a month. Here, at last, was progress; sales were at almost a quarter of the minimum profitable rate, instead of a mere fifth.
On July 1, 1959, there were 83,849 Edsels on the country’s roads. The largest number (8,344) were in California, which is perennially beset with far and away the largest number of cars of practically all makes, and the smallest number were in Alaska, Vermont, and Hawaii (122, 119, and 110, respectively). All in all, the Edsel seemed to have found a niche for itself as an amusingly eccentric curiosity. Although the Ford Company, with its stockholders’ money still disappearing week after week into the Edsel, and with small cars now clearly the order of the day, could scarcely affect a sentimental approach to the subject, it nonetheless took an outside chance and, in mid-October of 1959, brought out a third series of annual models. The 1960 Edsel appeared a little more than a month after the Falcon, Ford’s first—and instantly successful—venture into the small-car field, and was scarcely an Edsel at all; gone were both the vertical grille and the horizontal rear end, and what remained looked like a cross between a Ford Fairlane and a Pontiac. Its initial sales were abysmal; by the middle of November only one plant—in Louisville, Kentucky—was still turning out Edsels, and it was turning out only about twenty a day. On November 19th, the Ford Foundation, which was planning to sell a block of its vast holdings of stock in the Ford Motor Company, issued the prospectus that is required by law under such circumstances, and stated therein, in a footnote to a section describing the company’s products, that the Edsel had been “introduced in September 1957 and discontinued in November 1959.” The same day, this mumbled admission was confirmed and amplified by a Ford Company spokesman, who did some mumbling of his own. “If we knew the reason people aren’t buying the Edsel, we’d probably have done something about it,” he said.
The final quantitative box score shows that from the beginning right up to November 19th, 110,810 Edsels were produced and 109,466 were sold. (The remaining 1,344, almost all of them 1960 models, were disposed of in short order with the help of drastic price cuts.) All told, only 2,846 of the 1960 Edsels were ever produced, making models of that year a potential collector’s item. To be sure, it will be generations before 1960 Edsels are as scarce as the Type 41 Bugatti, of which no more than eleven specimens were made, back in the late twenties, to be sold only to bona-fide kings, and the 1960 Edsel’s reasons for being a rarity are not exactly as acceptable, socially or commercially, as the Type 41 Bugatti’s. Still, a 1960-Edsel Owners’ Club may yet appear.
The final fiscal box score on the Edsel fiasco will probably never be known, because the Ford Motor Company’s public reports do not include breakdowns of gains and losses within the individual divisions. Financial buffs estimate, however, that the company lost something like $200 million on the Edsel after it appeared; add to this the officially announced expenditure of $250 million before it appeared, subtract about a hundred million invested in plant and equipment that were salvageable for other uses, and the net loss is $350 million. If these estimates are right, every Edsel the company manufactured cost it in lost money about $3,200, or about the price of another one. In other, harsher words, the company would have saved itself money if, back in 1955, it had decided not to produce the Edsel at all but simply to give away 110,810 specimens of its comparably priced car, the Mercury.
THE end of the Edsel set off an orgy of hindsight in the press. Time declared, “The Edsel was a classic case of the wrong car for the wrong market at the wrong time. It was also a prime example of the limitations of market research, with its ‘depth interviews’ and ‘motivational’ mumbo-jumbo.” Business Week, which shortly before the Edsel made its bow had described it with patent solemnity and apparent approval, now pronounced it “a nightmare” and appended a few pointedly critical remarks about Wallace’s research, which was rapidly achieving a scapegoat status equal to that of Brown’s design. (Jumping up and down on motivational research was, and is, splendid sport, but, of course, the implication that it dictated, or even influenced, the Edsel’s design is entirely false, since the research, being intended only to provide a theme for advertising and promotion, was not undertaken until after Brown had completed his design.) The Wall Street Journal’s obituary of the Edsel made a point that was probably sounder, and certainly more original.
Large corporations are often accused of rigging markets, administering prices, and otherwise dictating to the consumer [it observed]. And yesterday Ford Motor Company announced its two-year experiment with the medium-priced Edsel has come to an end … for want of buyers. All this is quite a ways from auto makers being able to rig markets or force consumers to take what they want them to take.… And the reason, simply, is that there is no accounting for tastes.… When it comes to dictating, the consumer is the dictator without peer.
The tone of the piece was friendly and sympathetic; the Ford Company, it seemed, had endeared itself to the Journal by playing the great American situation-comedy role of Daddy the Bungler.
As for the post-mortem explanations of the debacle that have been offered by former Edsel executives, they are notable for their reflective tone—something like that of a knocked-out prize fighter opening his eyes to find an announcer’s microphone pushed into his face. In fact, Krafve, like many
a flattened pugilist, blames his own bad timing; he contends that if he had been able to thwart the apparently immutable mechanics and economics of Detroit, and had somehow been able to bring out the Edsel in 1955, or even 1956, when the stock market and the medium-priced-car market were riding high, the car would have done well and would still be doing well. That is to say, if he had seen the punch coming, he would have ducked. Krafve refuses to go along with a sizable group of laymen who tend to attribute the collapse to the company’s decision to call the car the Edsel instead of giving it a brisker, more singable name, reducible to a nickname other than “Ed” or “Eddie,” and not freighted with dynastic connotations. As far as he can see, Krafve still says, the Edsel’s name did not affect its fortunes one way or the other.
Brown agrees with Krafve that bad timing was the chief mistake. “I frankly feel that the styling of the automobile had very little, if anything, to do with its failure,” he said later, and his frankness may pretty safely be left unchallenged. “The Edsel program, like any other project planned for future markets, was based on the best information available at the time in which decisions were made. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions!”
Doyle, with the born salesman’s intensely personal feeling about his customers, talks like a man betrayed by a friend—the American public. “It was a buyers’ strike,” he says. “People weren’t in the mood for the Edsel. Why not is a mystery to me. What they’d been buying for several years encouraged the industry to build exactly this kind of car. We gave it to them, and they wouldn’t take it. Well, they shouldn’t have acted like that. You can’t just wake up somebody one day and say, ‘That’s enough, you’ve been running in the wrong direction.’ Anyway, why did they do it? Golly, how the industry worked and worked over the years—getting rid of gear-shifting, providing interior comfort, providing plus performance for use in emergencies! And now the public wants these little beetles. I don’t get it!”
