E-Day

Fifty years ago, Ford Motor Company launched a new product on what came to be known as E-Day, a car model that ended up as one of the biggest disasters in automotive history. Cover photo courtesy of http://tiraudan.com.

We’re coming up on the 50th anniversary — in just two days — of one of the most spectacular events of American cultural history. It was on September 4, 1957, after months and months of media hype that Ford Motor Company introduced — drum roll — the Edsel.

The day was known as E-Day.

The back story (and remember — take as much or little of this as you want or need): Every generation of American pop culture is littered with the ruins of products that failed to live up to the hype. Gen-Xers will recall, for example, the release of “New Coke” in 1985, which took only two months to completely tank as consumers clamored for the classic flavor. Or how about Betamax, the videotape format that Sony developed that provided clean images but only an hour of recording time? It wasn’t long until VHS came along and sent Betamax the way of the dodo.

Early baby boomers, though, may have witnessed the Mother of All Product Failures back in the...