Demand now hot for Edsels
And while there were all sorts of grass-roots celebrations, Edsel's parent, the Ford Motor Co., didn't make a fuss. There was no homecoming at headquarters and no big cake shaped like the puckered-mouth grille. Perhaps the five-decade-old memory is still raw, or perhaps Ford is too busy with its own problems.
But the Edsel rolls on, perhaps causing a bigger stir now than when it was new. It remains a punch line, a symbol of 1950s excess and a cautionary tale of how the best-laid plans can collide with reality. Yet even in ignominy, the car has its fans and fanatics; the Edsel is more desirable today than some contemporaries that were in greater demand when new.
Still, these are not valuable collectibles but cultural curiosities, which is why the Edsel has an appeal that extends beyond the community of car collectors.
"The Edsel is one of the most economical collector cars you can get into," said Phil Skinner, collector-car-market editor for Kelley Blue Book and past president of the Edsel Owners Club. But he is a realist as well. Edsel is an acronym, he said, for "every day someone else laughs."
Despite several features that were not necessarily innovations — a vertical grille, self-adjusting brakes, Teletouch transmission buttons on the steering wheel and a floating speedometer that glowed when a preset speed was reached — the Edsel was panned by the public. Among other things, it was derided for having a grille that looked like a toilet seat. Time magazine popularized the wisecrack that it looked like an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon.
Ford initially organized Edsel as a stand-alone division, and 1,300 independent dealers were established throughout the country. But in January 1958, sensing a disaster in the making, Ford moved to integrate Edsel with Lincoln and Mercury, creating a division known as M-E-L.
The Edsel originally came in four series: the Pacer and Ranger were based on the standard Ford body; the fancier Citation and Corsair were built on the bigger Mercury body. For the introductory year of 1958 there were 18 models. For 1959, the Edsel got a single body shared with the '59 Ford, and by 1960 there was little attempt to hide the underlying Ford that peeked out all over.
The spectacular sales debacle has been attributed to many reasons. Certainly the quality of early Edsels was poor; some parts ran out; incomplete cars went to dealerships with repair instructions, forcing dealers to cannibalize brand new cars.
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