The Edsel Disaster

Marketing Disasters and the 'Edsel' Model from Ford is synonymous. So why was Edsel such a failure?. When the car was launched, it was supposed to change the way people looked at cars. But in the end it was destined to be doomed. Murphy's law worked overtime. 'Anything can go wrong will' and it did. Wrong concept, poor quality, disastrous marketing, wrong timing - you name it and Edsel had it.

Ford Edsel was supposed to be the 'car of the decade' when launched in 1957.

But half of the models sold proved spectacularly defective. If lucky, one could have got a car with any or all of the following features: doors that wouldn't close, bonnets and boots that wouldn't open, batteries that went flat, hooters that stuck, hubcaps that dropped off, paint that peeled, transmissions that seized up, brakes that failed and push buttons that couldn't be pushed even with three of you trying.

In a stroke of marketing genius, the Edsel, one of the biggest and most lavish cars ever built, coincided with a phase when people increasingly wanted economy cars. 'It was a classic case of the wrong car for the wrong market at the wrong time.'

Unpopular to begin with, the car's popularity declined. One business writer at the time likened the Edsel's sales graph to an extremely dangerous ski-slope. He added that, so far as he knew, there was only one case of an Edsel ever being stolen.

The saddest part was that US Automakers never learned the lessons from the Edsel disasters. They continued to make large, fuel inefficient, poor quality cars throughout 60's and 70's leading to the Auto Industry being taken over by the compact, efficient, sleek small car manufacturers from Japan.