Edsel Ford, the curiously named only son of Henry, and President of Ford Motor Company from 1919 to 1943, was born on this day in 1893. His posthumous fame (if that's the word) was assured when a new Ford bearing his name was launched with much hype and razzmatazz in 1957 - and flopped spectacularly. What went wrong? Examine the picture above and ask yourself, What's not to like?
Friday, 6 November 2009
What's Not To Like?
Edsel Ford, the curiously named only son of Henry, and President of Ford Motor Company from 1919 to 1943, was born on this day in 1893. His posthumous fame (if that's the word) was assured when a new Ford bearing his name was launched with much hype and razzmatazz in 1957 - and flopped spectacularly. What went wrong? Examine the picture above and ask yourself, What's not to like?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Full on, it looks a bit like Alan Carr...
ReplyDeleteWhereever Edsel is, I hope he takes comfort in knowing that, even though the car was a bust, the grill lived on to inspire one of the great films of all time.
ReplyDeleteFord have a fine tradition of giving birth to bummers. The current visual disaster is the Ford Fusion, about to have the Luger pointed at the back of its neck when the Russians started buying it in some numbers, sentence, for the moment, postponed.
ReplyDeleteFord of course are absolute amateurs when compared with British Leyland, I was at the degree ceremony in Coventry Cathedral when Gordon Sked, the man responsible for some of the automotive industries biggest eyesores, was given an honorary doctorate.
For his services to the British car industry.
It may have tanked but to me it looks a lot more stylish than today's vast but faceless corporate Mercs. If you were going to drive coast to coast across America, wouldn't that be a proper ride for it? I can't see Basil Fawlty flogging that with a tree, Malty.
ReplyDeleteI see the grille was described at the time as looking 'like a Buick sucking a lemon'. It also looks like that face children like to pull by pressing their cheeks together and getting a vertical mouth. We can't help seeing faces everywhere, that's our trouble (trouble? No actually it makes life more interesting and things look a lot less thingish)...
ReplyDeleteYes, the poor old grille, now sadly a scalp dangling from NCAP's belt.
ReplyDeleteTalking of offspring with odd names, how about Soulima Stravinsky, was his paw taking the widdle?
ReplyDeleteIt looks f*****g awful, a drag coefficient that probably is similar to a Hummer (and the looks)
ReplyDeleteThe one interesting thing to note was the gear shift, a series of buttons mounted on the steering wheel, just like Formula One now, and so a car well ahead of its time. Mind you the buttons confused the Yanks.
Vulgar, vulgar, vulgar. And a little bit vulvar.
ReplyDeleteWhat's that godawful colour? Ford should have stuck with black. And Henry.
ReplyDelete2202 "Mind you the buttons confused the Yanks".
ReplyDeleteCare to explain that bit of racist dogma? Since the 'Yanks' invented it, I woud imagine we coud operate it.
And by the way, referring to all Americans as 'Yanks' is the same thing as inferring that all Brits come from the channel islands. If you're going to try and insult someone, at least have a clue what you're talking about.
Expressing your anti-American sentiment in a non-political blog is a really sorry way of making a point.