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The local school has a market day once a month and I found a book there, by an Aussie automotive journalist. Had a couple of Packard related entries but it won't find any favour here!

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Rather than "lemon" the title for this book-whoever published and "wrote" this ridiculous trash-ought to be the same title as the TV show that Vegas comedians Penn & Teller had, using the initials B.S..

RE: Edsel...
The Edsel was only a failure in as much as ...
? It failed to find a niche in the crowded segment it was looking to enter
? The purpose of starting a new brand at Ford was unclear
? Promises of the new car were not fulfilled
? The car was launched during the 1958 recession, which was a most inopportune time to do so.

As far as attacking the Edsel otherwise... it was purely a Ford/Mecury underneath. So why would it be so bad and the Ford and Mercury NOT be? Absurd logic. And revelation that somebody is being nothing more than a gasbag.

RE: Packard Predictor...
No idea what motivated the preposterous attacks on the Predictor other than a bad attempt at comedy... but whoever "'wrote" all this obviously never knew anything about cars... and certainly not about American cars. And quite obviously, nothing at all about Packards. Predictor was the most successful concept shown at the Chicago Auto Show that year it debuted there and even the papers said so. And so did the crowds. To claim otherwise out of a foreign book is like bearing witness to the Kennedy years when you were born in Russia in the 1970s!

Predictor actually DID predict so many things that followed that the list would be a half-page long. Read the history of the car as published in the Packard Club Packard Cormorant magazine for a REAL look at what it predicted. And claiming the roof copied "Ford Anglia" is like claiming is like claiming a Maytag upright washing machine was copied from a 1950s Zenith TV set. The Predictor ROOF came from the Packard Balboa-X... WHICH (if anyone is keeping track) also won numerous awards and was highly popular for its day. And FORD later copied Packard with the Continental roof of 1958-1960 and the Mercury "Breezeway" rear windows and roofs. NOT the other way around.

AND...making a big whoop-dee-doo over a windshield "dogleg" for a wrap-around windshield on an American car in the 1950s is nothing more than a confession of extreme ignorance about the subject. MOST 1950s American cars with the exception of MoPars had windshield A-pillar doglegs. This was NOT a design flaw and certainly not limited to Predictor alone.

And Predictor had ZERO to do with the downfall of Packard. This is just garbage.

RE: the "Arbib Dome"...
Finally IF the "writer" bothered to check, the Richard Arbib-designed concept car attacked was NOT called the "Arbib Dome" but rather was known as the "Astro-Gnome"...and it was merely intended to be a concept car...and a fascinating one. The fact that it did not "go to production" does NOT make it a "failure." On this basis that means virtually EVERY one-off concept is a "failure"...which is just more absurd talk-which proves what?

No, this attempt at some kind of rank comedy book is both ignorant and absurd. And no... the only use it ought to have on a Packard book shelf is to illustrate just how far things can go while still having people posing with serious-sounding titles as "journalist" and "author." Editorial opinion is NOT automotive history. And neither is ill-conceived comedy. In my years writing for Ford of Australia, I learned the meaning of the term "spew" from my Aussie buddies. And I think "spew" applies here. A better use for this "book" would be for wrapping garbage and putting it where it belongs.

Edsel sales were really not that bad. Supposedly McNamara was using it to ruin some of his rivals at Ford. He very cleverly was able to use the results of corporate politics to inhibit the brand and then pin the blame on his rivals Crusoe and Breech. After they were gone he became the top dog. So much for the Harvard Business School's ethics program. Such behavior is not in the best interests of customers and stockholders alike.

Not that I like the Edsel, but just because I don't like something they are doing now doesn't mean I am going to post it on junktube.