[Jeff Gordon]

I recall Robert McNamara being called the "father of the Edsel" during the time he was SECDEF. It appears that was a misconception.

The two things that stand out about the Edsel was the toilet seat grill and the push button gear shift in the middle of the steering wheel. I also remember the car being a joke among consumers of the time.

[BluesDuke]

The infamous grille - and a few of the advertisements used to promote the car (one television spot featured a sultry feminine voice purring, "It's like being in love") - provoked the bulk of those jokes, as I recall reading. The grille was compared to anything from a horse collar (the standard analogy) to a certain part of the female sexual anatomy, the latter provoking such gags as the car should have been called the Ethel instead of the Edsel; or, if an Edsel rear-ended a Cadillac the offspring would be an Edsellac.

The grille was most pronounced on the car's debut lines in 1958, but was understated a bit more (largely by the fuller grille wings on either side of it) on the 1959 models. The 1960 model, of course, did away with it entirely and looked, really, like nothing more than a Barris-customised Ford with the Galaxie 500 body styling and the Fairlane 500 roof, not to mention that Pontiac Bonneville-derived front hourglass grille divider. I think it's been mostly with hindsight that the Edsel came to be considered a better car than it was credited with being. In 1969 there met the first known car club for Edsel buffs and within a few years the Edsel was one of the five most popular collectible cars of the 1950s. A little over 6,000 Edsels total were built between the first production in late 1957 and the final production in late 1959 (for the 1960 models).

Edsel's promotion also included a short-lived sponsorship of the then-popular TV western, Wagon Train, and an even shorter-lived variety show hosted by Frank Sinatra, The Edsel Show.

My call: Ford overall had a decent enough idea in concept when it first conceived the E-car, but it jumped in the pool before they bothered to fill it with water. For the reasons I squirreled out in the earlier post, it is not impossible to think that, with a little more patient development and a little less subtle-as-a-trainwreck promotion, the Edsel could have survived. When the auto industry's late-1950s recession finally dissipated and the midmarket came back, there probably was room enough for the Edsel. Thanks to Ford's haste, the car probably didn't stand a chance. A shame, too. The 1959 Edsel really was a handsome enough and very driveable car.