Edsel

Edsel is a defunct brand of automobiles that was produced by the Ford Motor Company from the 1958 to 1960 model years. The namesake of Edsel Ford, the Edsel line was developed in an effort to give Ford a fourth brand to gain additional market share from Chrysler and General Motors. Established as an expansion of the Lincoln–Mercury Division (re-christened as the Mercury–Edsel–Lincoln Division), Edsel shared a price range with Mercury and its bodies with both Mercury and Ford.

Competing against Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Dodge, and DeSoto, Edsel was the first new brand introduced by an American automaker since the 1939 launch of Mercury and the 1956 launch of Continental; the latter was retired and merged into Lincoln during the 1957 model year.

In the year leading up to its release, Ford invested in an advertising campaign, marketing Edsels as the cars of the future. While 1958 Edsels introduced multiple advanced features for the price segment, the launch of the model line became symbolic of commercial failure. Introduced in a recession that catastrophically affected sales of all medium-priced cars, Edsels were considered overhyped, low quality, and unattractive; a central part of their design featured a vertical grille (and its resemblance to a horse collar).

Following a loss of over $250 million (equivalent to $2.72 billion in 2025 dollars) on development, manufacturing, and marketing on the model line, Ford quietly discontinued the Edsel brand in November 1959, shortly after the 1960 model line was introduced.

Ford Motor Company became a publicly traded corporation on January 17, 1956, and thus was no longer entirely owned by members of the Ford family. The company was now able to sell cars according to current market trends following the seller's market of the postwar years. Ford's new management compared the company's roster of makes with that of General Motors and Chrysler, and concluded that Lincoln was competing not with Cadillac, but with Oldsmobile, Buick, and DeSoto. Ford developed a plan to move Lincoln upmarket, with the Continental broken out as a separate make at the top of Ford's product line, and to add premium/intermediate vehicles to the intermediate slot vacated by Lincoln.

Ford explained in 1958 that "The Edsel is new but it's actually the germination of an idea conceived by Edsel Ford who thought years ago that the company should have greater representation in the medium-price range. This idea was furthered by his son, Henry Ford II, in 1948 when another car was proposed to keep abreast of things in the automotive market."

Marketing research and development for the new intermediate line had begun in 1955 under the code name "E car", which stood for "experimental car." Ford Motor Company eventually decided on the name "Edsel", in honor of Edsel Ford, son of the company's founder, Henry Ford despite objections from Edsel's son Henry Ford II. The proposed vehicle marque represented the start-up of a new division of the firm, alongside that of Ford itself and the Lincoln–Mercury division, whose cars at the time shared the same bodies.

Ford later claimed to have performed more than adequate, if not superior, product development and market research work in the planning and design of the new vehicle. Ford assured its investors, and the Detroit automotive press, that Edsels were not only superior products, as compared to their Oldsmobile/Buick/DeSoto competition, but the details of their styling and specifications were the result of a sophisticated market analysis and research and development effort, that would essentially guarantee their broad acceptance by the buying public when the cars were introduced.