http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/upshot/the-edsel-a-high-tech-car-undone-by-technology.html?abt=0002&abg=0Hubris, and Sputnik, Doomed the Edsel
JUNE 6, 2015
The three sons of Edsel Ford at an event introducing the Edsel Citation convertible. The car brand’s many models were an utter failure with consumers, and Henry Ford II, right, then the president of Ford Motor, reproached himself for allowing his father’s name to become fodder for widespread ridicule. Credit Bettmann/Corbis
The Ford Motor Company in the late 1950s gambled about $250 million (roughly $2.1 billion today) to create what The New York Times called the “first new brand name” to be introduced by one of the Big Three car companies (General Motors, Ford and Chrysler) since 1938. The car was the Edsel, a name that remains a synonym for a failed product.
With so many foreign competitors crushed by the devastation of World War II, the mid-1950s economy of the United States was soaring. In 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act, authorizing the creation of ultimately more than 45,000 miles of high-speed roads, some American auto manufacturers must have been tempted to light their cigars with $100 bills.
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