Roy Brown, who has died aged 96, was a leading car designer with Ford Motors; he was best known for the 1957 Edsel, a vehicle which has gone down in history as Detroit’s greatest ever flop, but he was also responsible for one of the company’s greatest successes, the Ford Cortina.
Ford conceived the Edsel line in the mid-1950s as a mid-priced competitor to General Motors’ Oldsmobiles and Buicks. After rejecting such unlikely names (suggested by the poet Marianne Moore) as Intelligent Whale, Ford Fabergé, Mongoose Civique and Utopian Turtletop, the company plumped for Edsel, after the late son of the founder Henry Ford.
In August 1957 the Edsel was launched with great fanfare during a Bing Crosby-Frank Sinatra live television spectacular. There were four versions: the Ranger, Corsair, Pacer and Citation, with a choice of two V8s: a 361 and a 410.
Initial reviews were enthusiastic. Popular Science magazine wrote of “gadgets beyond a gadgeteer’s dreams of glory”; “more engine power than the average motorist will know what to do with”; and “styling that reverses the years-long trend to horizontal-pattern front ends, and chrome enough to tax the output of the world’s mines”. The car, the magazine claimed, “takes off like a gazelle one jump ahead of a drooling lion”.
In reality, though, the Edsel was little more than a hybrid of existing Ford and Mercury models, with gimmicks such as a gyroscope-style speedometer; a steering wheel-mounted push-button auto selector; a bold vertical “horse collar” grille instead of the more conventional horizontal design; boomerang-shaped tail lamps; and a two-tone “scalloped” side. Indeed, the cars were built on Ford’s already existing assembly lines, sharing the same chassis as the company’s other models, but with different parts which workers found hard to put together correctly. As a result the cars were dogged by quality problems.
Brown’s early clay models had been quite stylish, but by the time the engineers and accountants had had their say, the result was anything but. The horizontal tail lamps were compared to ingrowing toenails; and the grille, in particular, aroused ribaldry, with one commentator likening the car to “a Mercury pushing a toilet seat” and another comparing it to “an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon”.
There were also complaints that the name was confusing. Market surveys found that people associated the Edsel with “pretzel”, “weasel” and “dead cell”. When the then Vice-President Richard Nixon was pelted with eggs as he rode in a convertible Edsel through Lima, Peru, he could joke that “They were throwing eggs at the car, not me”.
Not surprisingly, the Edsel failed to catch on with the public. Ford’s goal had been to sell 200,000 of the cars a year, but sales in the first year were only 63,000. As it became clear that they had a turkey on their hands, Ford went to desperate lengths to promote the car, launching a campaign to “Name the Pony”: every Ford dealership had a pony to give away as a prize, and an offer to give buyers any colour they wanted — even if it meant painting a blue car black.
But, as Brown noted, while the executives at Ford’s headquarters were racking their brains as to what to do next, one drew them to the window overlooking the parking lot — “and there were all these smaller cars”. By 1957 the post-war boom had ended and the country was in recession; people were not in the mood to buy lumbering gas-guzzlers like the Edsel. After less than three years of production, the car was consigned to oblivion.
During its short lifespan, the Edsel had reportedly lost Ford between $250 million and $350 million, and had bankrupted many Ford dealers. Members of the design team were sent to Ford outposts until the furore and embarrassment died down.
Brown found himself banished to the company’s office at Dagenham in England where, as head of design, he redeemed his reputation by designing the Ford Consul and the 1962 Ford Cortina, which went on to become the most commercially successful British car of all time.
The son of a Chrysler engineer, Roy Abbott Brown was born on October 30 1916, in Hamilton, Ontario. The family moved to Detroit when he was 15.
After wartime service in the US Army, he began his career as a designer in the General Motors Cadillac studio and later oversaw the design of the Oldsmobile. He joined Ford in 1953, and before working on the Edsel led the design team for the 1955 Lincoln Futura, a “concept car” which became a model for the “Batmobile”.
Brown’s greatest commercial success was undoubtedly the Cortina, Ford’s reply to BMC’s Mini. The Cortina was a saloon car which took the British market by storm, selling nearly three million in the UK alone before it was replaced by the Sierra.
Brown returned to the United States in the late 1960s and went on to design Thunderbirds and the Econoline vans of the 1970s before retiring in 1979.
In retrospect, the Edsel was not as much of a disaster for Ford as it first appeared. To make the car, Ford had added plant capacity, which they used to build more successful models such as the Falcon and the Mustang as the American economy recovered.
Brown, meanwhile, remained unrepentant about his creation and drove an Edsel until almost the end of his life.“The car does not have a bad line on it,” he claimed in 1996. “It is not superfluous in chrome like most of the cars of that time, and it still looks good. I’m kind of proud of it.”
From the late 1960s the Edsel became a collector’s item, with enthusiasts founding Edsel clubs all over the United States. But when people asked Brown whether he would sell them his car, he replied: “Where the hell were you in 1958?”
Roy Brown is survived by his wife, Jeanne, and by two sons and two daughters from an earlier marriage.
Roy Brown, born October 30 1916, died February 24 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment