| Noble (?) failures Posted by grahame at 05:31, 4th September 2026 |     |
Key Facts
Name Origin: Named after Edsel Ford, the son of founder Henry Ford and former president of the company.
The Launch: Debuted on September 4, 1957 (known as "E-Day"), following a massive, highly publicized hype and teaser campaign.
Unique Features: Famous for its polarizing vertical "horse-collar" grille, rolling-dome speedometer, and the Teletouch push-button automatic transmission located right in the center of the steering wheel.
Models Offered: Included upscale models like the Citation and Corsair, as well as lower-priced choices like the Pacer and Ranger.
The Failure: Became a legendary corporate failure due to poor timing during an economic recession, quality control issues on shared assembly lines, and a design that public consumers largely disliked. Ford lost hundreds of millions of dollars before discontinuing the brand in November 1959
Name Origin: Named after Edsel Ford, the son of founder Henry Ford and former president of the company.
The Launch: Debuted on September 4, 1957 (known as "E-Day"), following a massive, highly publicized hype and teaser campaign.
Unique Features: Famous for its polarizing vertical "horse-collar" grille, rolling-dome speedometer, and the Teletouch push-button automatic transmission located right in the center of the steering wheel.
Models Offered: Included upscale models like the Citation and Corsair, as well as lower-priced choices like the Pacer and Ranger.
The Failure: Became a legendary corporate failure due to poor timing during an economic recession, quality control issues on shared assembly lines, and a design that public consumers largely disliked. Ford lost hundreds of millions of dollars before discontinuing the brand in November 1959
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel
There have been some noble (and nit so noble) failures in the railway world, and some of them are associated with great engineers who had other magnificnent successes but these cases results were not as planned:
Leader
Drumm Electric Train
Bideford, Westward Ho! and Appledore
4DD trains
Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway
Advanced Passenger Train
Waterloo and Whitehall Railway
Class 769 trains
Brill Branch
Cardiff Railway (Treforest)
| Re: Noble (?) failures Posted by CyclingSid at 09:51, 4th September 2026 | |
Should this be titled like the recent awards; Ignoble failures?
| Re: Noble (?) failures Posted by Mark A at 10:07, 4th September 2026 | |
OK, I'll bite. The APT was failed by a country that was in fundamentally unserious mode concerning the train and I suspect that many other aspects of railway travel benefitted from the research that produced it. Also, to engineer that tilt mechanism in a purely analogue way. If the trains running on the GWML now were a descendent of the ATP I suspect that everyone would be rather happier with the ambience of the passenger compartments than they are.
Mark
