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Actually, Robert McNamara had little but contempt for the entire Edsel project; if anything, he did his best to undermine the project, which was conceived originally as a bid by Ford to bolster its position in what you could call the "move-up" market: buyers who were ready to move up from the basic Fords and had, among Ford-made cars, only the Mercury to choose, and wanted a little style to burn and a few innovations if they could get them. Enter the Edsel.

The car's odd enough style, a number of problems with spare parts suppliers to dealers, and the sometimes outlandish publicity campaign Ford conceived to promote the car (Ford so sonorously beat the publicity drum for the new marque that the Edsel itself couldn't have lived up to it even if it was the second coming of Cadillac) did the Edsel no favours. But perhaps what really killed the Edsel before it had a real chance to wring out its kinks and find its audience was the recession that hit the auto industry as the car made its premiere; it is entirely possible that any new marque, never mind one as odd as the Edsel, would not have stood a chance. (Ford didn't help any by being so hasty with the car once it committed to it that there had been assembly problems, with some Edsels requiring finishing assemblies at the dealerships.)

According to Ford historiographers Peter Collier and David Horowitz, there were those in and out of Ford who believed that the Edsel could have survived if it had waited perhaps another year to premiere, because the midmarket had begun to come back by 1960. Unfortunately, following the unusual 1958 design, for 1959 and 1960 the Edsel became more like a hastily-made Ford with a few weirdo design touches; the 1960 Edsel dropped out of production practically after it began production (only 2,846 1960 Edsels were made - in fact, the rarest Edsel of them all is said to be the 1960 Edsel Villager 9-passenger station wagon: only 59 of these cars were produced for the 1960 model year. The last Edsel rolled off the line in November 1959.

The 1958 Edsel actually had two sizes: a Mercury-sized pair of cars (the Citation and Corsair models) and a Ford-sized pair (slightly smaller, the Ranger and Pacer). The 1959 Edsel began looking more like a Ford even with the famous horsecollar grille and did away with the Merc-sized offerings; the 1959 Edsel offered only a Ford-sized Ranger and Corsair. The 1960 Edsel offered only the Ranger. All three years produced station wagons in six and nine passenger configurations. From what I have been able to gather, most automotive reviewers and critics of the era seemed to believe the 1959 Edsels were the best of the line.