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By Root 2606 0

for some time – as early as 1940 De Soto was boasting a model with ‘Fluid Drive Simplimatic Transmission’ – but it was really the development of powerful V-8 engines, a direct spinoff of World War II technology, that allowed car makers to provide lots of gadgetry and gave the marketing people the scope to scramble for technological hyperbole. Some actively suggested aeronautic qualities, like the 1955 Buick which came with RSVP (short for ‘Really Sensational Variable Pitch’) propeller blades. As the ads explained, these changed their pitch ‘like the propellers on an air liner, and what that does to getaway from a standing start – or for a safety-surge when it’s needed out on the highway – is something you can only believe from firsthand experience’. Others, like the Thunderbird with its Trigger-Torque Power and Speed-Trigger Fordomatic Transmission, sounded as if they might have the capacity to shoot down rival motorists. The next year Thunderbird added Cruise-O-Matic Transmission, presumably so that the driver could keep both hands on the gun.

By 1956 cars had features that all but promised lift-off. Chryslers came with PowerFlite Range-Selector, Torque-Flight Transmission, Torsion-Aire Suspension and Super-Scenic Windshield. The Packard offered New Torsion-Level Ride and Twin Ultramatic Transmission, while the Chevrolet Bel-Air had a hold-on-to-your-hats feature called a Triple-Turbine TurboGlide. Mercury, misreading the market, could offer nothing zippier than Dream-Car Design and Seat-O-Matic Dial that remembered the driver’s favoured position, and paid heavily for its technological timidity with lost sales.

The height of this techno-excess came in 1957 when Packard produced a 145-horsepower Super Eight model, which came equipped with everything but a stewardess. The vaunted features included Prest-O-Justment Seats, Flite-Glo Dials, Comfort-Aire Ventilation, Console-Key Instrument Panel and Push-Button Control Wrinkle-Resistant RoboTop Convertible Roof. Unfortunately it drove like a tank. Five years later, Packard was out of business.

The irony in this is that virtually none of the modern improvements to cars, such as disc brakes, fuel injection, front-wheel drive, torsion bars and the like, were invented in America. Detroit was more concerned with gloss and zip than with genuine research and development, and within twenty years it would be paying for this lapse dearly.15

In 1955, into the midst of this battlefield of technological hyperbole and aerodynamic styling, came a car so ineptly named, so clumsily styled, so lacking in panache that it remains almost forty years later a synonym for commercial catastrophe. I refer, of course, to the wondrous Edsel.

It is hard to believe now what high hopes Ford, its dealers and most of America had for this car when it was announced to the world. After the Ford Company’s huge success during its first two decades, it began to falter dangerously, largely because of Henry Ford’s extreme reluctance to offer six-cylinder engines or models with a few curves and a dash of styling. It fell behind not only General Motors, but even Walter Chrysler’s Plymouth. By the 1950s Ford desperately needed a success. A new mid-sized car seemed the best bet. General Motors had not introduced one since the La Salle in 1927 and Chrysler not since the Plymouth in 1928. Ford’s most recent effort at a breakthrough vehicle had been the Mercury way back in 1938.16 The time was right for a new, world-beating car. In 1952 Ford began work on a secret project it called the E car.

Huge care was taken with choosing a name. Ford’s advertising agency, Foote, Cone and Belding, drew up a list of 18,000 suggestions, and Ford staff added a further 2,500. The poet Marianne Moore was commissioned to come up with a list of names, and offered such memorable, if unusable, suggestions as the Mongoose Civique, the Utopian Turtletop, the Pluma Piluma, the Pastelogram, the Resilient Bullet, the Varsity Stroke and the Andante con Moto.

All of these were carefully whittled down to a short-list of sixteen names. On 8 November