Interesting cars from the past.

T

TennVet

Member
I visited a museum that had the Tucker automobile on display, and remember having two brothers as neighbors each of whom owned an Edsel. Neither car succeeded in the auto but for different reasons.
 

I visited a family owned Vintage Motor and toy museum yesterday. It has some fascinating cars there... like this one for example..

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The Edsel was probably way to much ahead of its time. I was pretty young when those boys next door had them. All the kids in the neighborhood were in awe of them.
 

I watched a video on the Edsel. The person owned one and was showing all the features. It soon became apparent to me why it failed.

The dashboard and how you interacted with it was radically different without offering any real advantage. It was just a different way of going about things for it's own sake. People would've seen right through it as a gimmick.

It was also pointed out that it cost more money for a car that had all these new ways of doing things.

All this and it was strange looking. I'm not sure what kind of consumer they were aiming for.
 
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.


After the decision was made in 1955, Ford ran more studies to make sure the new car had precisely the right “personality.” Research showed that Mercury buyers were generally young and hot-rod-inclined, while Pontiac, Dodge and Buick appealed to middle-aged people. Edsel was to strike a happy medium. As one researcher said, it would be “the smart car for the younger executive or professional family on its way up.” To get this image across, Ford even went to the trouble of putting out a 60-page memo on the procedural steps in the selection of an advertising agency, turned down 19 applicants before choosing Manhattan’s Foote, Cone & Belding. Total cost of research, design, tooling, expansion of production facilities: $250 million.


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.

What Happened to the Car Industry’s Most Famous Flop?
 
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