Title:
The Rough Road That Gave the Edsel a Bad Name
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
The Ford Motor Company built several versions of the
Edsel from nineteen fifty-eight to nineteen sixty.
Ford ended production of the car after just three
model years because of weak sales. The Edsel has
been described as a "colossal failure" -- that is
what the name has even come to mean in popular
language. But the Edsel has also been described as
"a car ahead of its time." John Heitmann is a
history professor at the University of Dayton in
Ohio and vice president of the Society for
Automotive Historians. He says: "It was a car that
was controversial in styling. Its horseshoe-shaped
grill is still remembered today. The Edsel is kind
of the example of the car that never caught
on."Professor Heitmann says the biggest problem was
that the Edsel arrived around the same time as a
recession. He says Americans were beginning to
question their values. "It's a really curious kind
of economic episode. It was actually quite severe
but also rather short. But it was at a time when
many Americans were reacting to the dinosaur in the
driveway. These very heavy, chrome-laden Buicks and
other cars -- the fifty-eight Buick had fifty-eight
pounds of chrome on it. The Edsel was also a very
heavy, very fuel-inefficient vehicle." Even so, some
people say the Edsel's technology more than made up
for what it lacked in looks and fuel efficiency.
"Shamrock" Shelly Cleaver is the public relations
director for the Edsel Owners Club in the United
States. Mr. Cleaver has been a member of the club
since it formed in nineteen sixty-nine. He says the
Edsel was the most modern car of its time. For
example, he says it was the first Ford product to
have self-adjusting brakes, but he liked one feature
especially. "The fifty-eight Edsel had five buttons
in the center of the steering wheel to shift the
gears ... That way you could shift the gears with
your left hand and keep your arm around your
girlfriend, or your wife, whatever and keep on
driving.""Shamrock" Shelly Cleaver made good use of
that feature when he got married in nineteen
fifty-eight. He went on his honeymoon in an Edsel,
with one arm on the wheel and the other around his
new wife. The Edsel was named for Edsel Ford, the
only child of company founder Henry Ford. Edsel was
president of Ford Motor Company until he died in
nineteen forty-three. Today the cars are considered
collector's items. They can cost anywhere from
hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of
dollars.For VOA Special English, I'm Alex
Villarreal.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
