There are cars people forget, and there are cars people remember for being a flop. This is one of the famous flops, and it was sitting in the same Richmond Hill lot north of Toronto where I find most of these, wearing an Ontario vanity plate that read BIMM 4 and a face nobody who has seen one ever forgets. A 1958 Edsel Pacer.
The Grille Nobody Forgets
You can argue about the rest of the car, but the grille is the whole conversation. Where every other 1958 sedan wore a wide horizontal mouth, the Edsel stood a tall vertical oval right up the centre of the nose, and people have been calling it names ever since. Horsecollar is the polite one. Head on, with the dual headlights set wide on either side, it looks like nothing else on the road, and that is exactly why it is worth standing in front of. A car that gets mocked for sixty years is a car nobody is indifferent to.
What a 1958 Edsel Pacer Actually Was
Edsel was a whole division Ford invented to sit between Ford and Mercury, sold as the mid-priced car of the future. The Pacer was the volume two-door hardtop, and 1958 was the only year it was built. Under the hood was a 361 cubic inch V8 making 303 horsepower, and inside is the part I like best, the Teletouch system, where the automatic transmission buttons sit in the hub of the steering wheel instead of on a lever. You can see them in the dashboard frame. It was clever, it was unreliable, and it was years ahead of anyone asking for it. The whole brand was overhyped, badly timed against a recession, and gone within three model years. Ford built only 6,717 Pacer hardtops, which is part of why one parked in a Canadian Tire lot still stops people.
Why a Flop Is Worth Shooting
Here is the turn. The 1958 Edsel Pacer failed so famously that the name became shorthand for failure, and that is exactly what makes a survivor like this one valuable now. The cars everyone loved when new are common. The one everyone laughed at is rare, because most of them were used up and thrown away. This light blue Pacer outlived the joke, and showing up on a Monday night decades later it is the car people walk over to first. You can see more of these nights in my street photography projects.
1958 Edsel Pacer with Blue Paint under a Hard Sky
I shot it with a Leica Q3 in available light, the way I shoot everything, the fixed 28mm lens and whatever the evening gives me. The sky did the work on this one. A bank of hard cloud came over the lot near the end of the night, and against that grey the light blue paint and all that chrome went almost electric. For the head-on frames I exposed for the sky and let the grille fill in bright underneath it, because a flat blue sky would have made the same car look ordinary. The camera details, if you want them, are on my gear page.
I do not photograph cars to rank them. I photograph the ones that have something to say, and a 1958 Edsel Pacer says plenty just by still being here.
