Some people think Ford’s short-lived Edsel brand of the late 1950s died off because the cars were ugly. And while that was likely a factor (I, for one, think the cars were gorgeous—including the 1958 model above, which is either a Pacer, Ranger, Citation or Corsair; It’s hard to tell those apart), Time Magazine wrote at the time that the true reasoning had a lot to do with bad timing.
Here’s a bit from their story:
As it turned out, the Edsel was a classic case of the wrong car for the wrong market at the wrong time. It was also a prime example of the limitations of market research, with its “depth interviews” and “motivational” mumbo-jumbo. On the research, Ford had an airtight case for a new medium-priced car to compete with Chrysler’s Dodge and DeSoto, General Motors’ Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick. Studies showed that by 1965 half of all U.S. families would be in the $5,000-and-up bracket, would be buying more cars in the medium-priced field, which already had 60% of the market. Edsel could sell up to 400,000 cars a year.
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A Taste of Lemon. The flaw in all the research was that by 1957, when Edsel appeared, the bloom was gone from the medium-priced field, and a new boom was starting in the compact field, an area the Edsel research had overlooked completely.
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