Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

by John Brooks

The final fiscal box score on the Edsel fiasco will probably never be known, because the Ford Motor Company’s public reports do not include breakdowns of gains and losses within the individual divisions. Financial buffs estimate, however, that the company lost something like $200 million on the Edsel after it appeared; add to this the officially announced expenditure of $250 million before it appeared, subtract about a hundred million invested in plant and equipment that were salvageable for other uses, and the net loss is $350 million. If these estimates are right, every Edsel the company manufactured cost it in lost money about $3,200, or about the price of another one. In other, harsher words, the company would have saved itself money if, back in 1955, it had decided not to produce the Edsel at all but simply to give away 110,810 specimens of its comparably priced car, the Mercury.