Oldsmobile

Oldsmobile was, for most of the twentieth century, one of the most consequential names in the American automobile — and at the end one of the most quietly redundant. Founded in 1897 by Ransom E. Olds, it was older than General Motors itself, older than Ford’s assembly line, and arguably the company that taught the industry how to build a car in volume. When GM finally retired it in 2004, it ended 107 years of continuous production.

The brand’s claim to history is not marketing. The Curved Dash Oldsmobile of 1901 is widely credited as the first mass-produced automobile, built on a moving-progressive assembly process with interchangeable parts years before Ford’s Model T line. Oldsmobile went on to introduce the first commercially successful fully automatic transmission, the Hydra-Matic, in 1940, and the high-compression overhead-valve Rocket V8 in 1949 that helped launch the postwar horsepower era.

For decades Oldsmobile occupied a comfortable rung on GM’s ladder — a notch above Chevrolet and Pontiac, below Buick and Cadillac — and in the muscle-car years its 442 and Cutlass models gave it genuine swagger. By the late 1970s the Cutlass was among the best-selling cars in America, and in the mid-1980s the division was moving on the order of a million cars a year.

Then the identity dissolved. A disastrous diesel engine in the early 1980s poisoned the brand’s reputation, and GM’s corporate badge-engineering left Oldsmobiles looking and feeling like Buicks and Pontiacs and Chevrolets. The company’s own “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign all but confessed the problem. Squeezed between Japanese imports and GM’s own crowded lineup, Oldsmobile lost its reason to exist. GM announced the wind-down on December 12, 2000, and the last car, an Alero, was built on April 29, 2004.

The Edsel

The Edsel is the rare product whose name became a common noun for failure, a fate few flops ever achieve. Launched by Ford in 1957 as an entirely new mid-price marque, it arrived wrapped in more secrecy, market research, and advertising bravado than perhaps any car before it. Ford promised the public something revolutionary, then delivered a competent but unremarkable automobile with an unusual grille, and the gap between promise and product became the whole story.

Named for Edsel Ford, the late son of Henry Ford and a respected company president in his own right, the Edsel was conceived to fill a perceived hole in Ford’s lineup between the cheap Ford and the upscale Lincoln, the territory General Motors dominated with Pontiac, Oldsmobile, and Buick. On paper, the logic was sound. In execution, almost everything that could go wrong did, and most of it had less to do with the car than with timing, expectations, and corporate self-sabotage.

The Edsel debuted into the teeth of the 1957-58 recession, which hit the mid-price segment hardest of all, just as buyers were starting to shift toward smaller, cheaper cars. Its build quality suffered because Edsels were assembled on existing Ford and Mercury lines by workers unfamiliar with the new model. Its lineup overlapped confusingly with the very Fords and Mercurys it was meant to complement. And its styling, particularly the vertical horse-collar grille, divided opinion sharply.

Ford had projected sales around 200,000 cars a year. It sold roughly 63,000 in the first model year and far fewer after that. The company killed the Edsel on November 19, 1959, after barely three model years, absorbing a reported loss in the range of $250 to $350 million. The car itself was not a disaster; the launch was, and the launch is what everyone remembered.