Made In America - Bill Bryson [221]
It was named for Edsel Ford, Henry and Clara Ford’s only child, who in turn had been named for Henry Ford’s best friend. The name had been considered once before, but had been discarded when consumer research showed that almost everyone thought it sounded like the name of a tractor or plough.
Having signally botched the name, the company went on to botch the design and production of the car. The chief stylist of the Edsel was Roy A. Brown, jun. By all accounts Brown’s initial design was a winner,*33 but excessive tampering – in particular the imposition of a grille that has been variously likened to a horse collar or toilet seat – doomed it. There was also the consideration that the Edsel was not very well made. The publicity department’s plan was to have seventy-five automotive writers drive identical green and turquoise Edsel Paces from Detroit to their home-town dealers. But when the first Edsels rolled off the assembly line they were so riddled with faults that Ford had to spend an average of $10,000 apiece – twice the cost of the car – getting them road-worthy. Even then it managed to have just sixty-eight cars ready by launch day.17 A further setback occurred when the Edsel made its public debut on a live national television special and wouldn’t start.
Edsel had the most expensive advertising promotion of any product up to that time, but the company could hardly give the cars away.18 Two years, two months, $450 million and 110,847 Edsels later, Ford pulled the plug, and the Edsel became part of history.
But the automobile as a component of American life went from strength to strength. By 1963 one-sixth of all American businesses were directly connected with the car in one way or another.19 The production of cars consumed 20 per cent of American steel, 30 per cent of glass and over 60 per cent of the nation’s rubber.20 By the 1970s, 94.7 per cent of American commuters travelled to work by car. About half had no access to any form of public transportation. They had to drive to work whether they wanted to or not. Most in fact wanted to. Today the car has become such an integral part of American life that the maximum distance the average American is prepared to walk without getting into a car is just six hundred feet.
Despite the nation’s attachment to the car, relatively few motoring terms have entered the general lexicon in the postwar years. Among the few: gridlock, coined in 1971 but not in general usage until about 1980; fast lane in a metaphorical sense (’life in the fast lane’) in 1978; drive-by shooting in 1985; and jump start in a metaphorical sense (’jump start the economy’) as recently as 1988. And that is about it.
What increasingly changed were the types of cars Americans drove. Until the early 1970s, with the exception of the Volkswagen Beetle and a few incidental European sports cars, American cars were overwhelmingly American. (In 1954, for instance, of the 7.2 million new cars sold in America, only 50,000, well under 1 per cent, were imports.) But then things changed as Japanese manufacturers entered the market. Made in Japan, which in the 1950s had been a joke term synonymous with shoddiness, took on an ominous sense of reliability and efficiency. Japanese car makers that few Americans had heard of in 1970 were by 1975 household names. *34
American car makers, so invincible only a decade before, suddenly seemed worryingly inept. They continued churning out heavy, often unreliable, gas-guzzlers (an Americanism of 1969) in overstaffed factories that were massively uncompetitive compared with the lean production techniques of the Japanese. By 1992 the American car industry was losing $700 million a month. Even those who patriotically tried to buy American (an