The Edsel Turns 50 years old
“Those Who Forget History Are Doomed to Repeat It”
So goes the wise words of warning. The history of automobile design contains many examples in which the designer was not, shall we say, firing on all cylinders. In the picture is a sketch of the 1899 Horsey Horseless, a car designed with a wooden horse head mounted on the front so as to not scare real horses, which were still plentiful at the time.
While the Ford Edsel was not the first bad car and certainly not the last, it has become the poster child of a really, really badly designed car. Perhaps one of the funniest design gaffs was the incorporation of what was known as push-button transmission. Instead of a stickshift or steering column shifter, the driver changed gears by pushing buttons.
Introduced by Chrysler, Ford took the design one step further by making them electric AND placing them in the middle of the steering wheel where the horn usually goes. So when the driver pounded his horn, he wound up shifting gears or damaging the push buttons….I’m not making this up.
It cost Ford 400 million dollars in investment…and that was the 1950s.
Pushing the envelope is not new. The classic chariot race in the movie Ben Hur immortalizes the need of mankind to show who’s the fastest. In the quest for bigger, faster and stronger in the automotive world, mistakes were bound to happen.
Here is the list of the 50 worst cars – you’ll get a good laugh:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1658545_1657686,00.html
For the Edsel, the real question isn’t why the designers goofed, but why senior management allowed the mistake to make it to market.
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