Ford Edsel

Edsel is a defunct automobile brand of Ford Motor Company that sold automobiles from the 1958 to the 1960 model years. Officially designated as a third brand of the Lincoln-Mercury Division (re-christened the Mercury-Edsel-Lincoln Division), Edsel (deriving its name from Edsel Ford) was intended to give Ford a fourth brand, allowing the company to gain additional market share between General Motors and Chrysler. In a similar fashion to Buick, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac (and Dodge and DeSoto), Edsel and Mercury shared a similar price range; the division shared bodies with both Ford and Mercury.

As Edsel marked the first launch of a new brand by a major American automaker since Mercury in 1939, Ford invested heavily in a yearlong advertising campaign leading consumers to believe that the Edsel was the car of the future. While the model line introduced several advanced features for its price segment, the 1958 launch of the Edsel would become a symbol of a commercial failure. Introduced in a recession that catastrophically affected sales of medium-priced cars, the Edsel was considered overhyped, unattractive (distinguished by its vertical grille), and low quality.

Following a loss of over $250 million on development, manufacturing, and marketing on the model line, Ford quietly discontinued the Edsel before 1960.

Background (1956–1957)
Ford Motor Company became a publicly traded corporation on January 17, 1956, and thus was no longer entirely owned by members of the Ford family. The company was now able to sell cars according to current market trends following the sellers' market of the postwar years.[dubious – discuss] Ford's new management compared the company's roster of makes with that of General Motors and Chrysler,[citation needed][dubious – discuss] and concluded that Lincoln was competing not with Cadillac, but with Oldsmobile, Buick, and DeSoto.[citation needed] Ford developed a plan to move Lincoln upmarket, with the Continental broken out as a separate make at the top of Ford's product line, and to add premium/intermediate vehicles to the intermediate slot vacated by Lincoln.[citation needed][original research?]

Marketing research and development for the new intermediate line had begun in 1955 under the code name "E car", which stood for "experimental car." Ford Motor Company eventually decided on the name "Edsel", in honor of Edsel B. Ford, son of the company's founder, Henry Ford (despite objections from Henry Ford II). The proposed vehicle marque would represent the start-up of a new division of the firm alongside that of Ford itself and the Lincoln-Mercury division, whose cars at the time shared the same bodies.

Ford later claimed to have performed more than adequate, if not superior, product development and market research work in the planning and design of the new vehicle. Ford assured its investors, and the Detroit automotive press, that Edsels were not only superior products (as compared to their Oldsmobile/Buick/DeSoto competition), but the details of their styling and specifications were the result of a sophisticated market analysis and research and development effort that would essentially guarantee their broad acceptance by the buying public when the cars were introduced.

In November 1956, the Edsel Division of Ford Motor Company was formed to establish a retail organization and dealer network, alongside Ford and Lincoln-Mercury (the Continental Division had ceased to exist several months earlier). With a network of 1,187 Edsel dealers, Ford Motor Company now had approximately 10,000 dealerships between its three divisions, bringing it closer in line with Chrysler (10,000 dealers across four brands) and General Motors (16,000 across six brands).