Unsuccessful cars can sometimes be much more interesting than slam-dunk winners. Give me a Leyland P76 over, say, the Mk1 Volkswagen Golf, launched around the same time.

It’s not just the vicarious interest of witnessing a metaphorical car crash that captivates me – it’s also the story behind it. No company sets out to make a turkey, but the way it was baked, nonetheless, is nearly always fascinating and often instructive.

Also, I feel sorry for the people who find themselves in the middle of the mess. There but for the grace of God…

The size of most automotive investments means that blow-ups are not only expensive but also often high-profile. Ford’s Edsel adventure is one of the car industry’s most infamous foul-ups: launched in 1957, it was axed just 26 months later.

But the seeds of the story go back decades, and that’s another aspect of automotive disasters I like: they sometimes occur over very long periods and for enigmatic reasons.

Henry Ford did much to create the modern car industry, but he had all the arrogance that being the world’s richest man can buy you (newer arrogant billionaires are available). He loved his Model T just too much; revolutionary when new in 1908, it was getting obsolete by the 1920s, and he wasn’t persuaded to replace it until 1927.

Meanwhile, across town, Alfred Sloan at General Motors was treating the car business just like the then embryonic consumer goods industry: a world of multiple brands, demographic targets and price points.

Moreover, he injected planned obsolescence, with model-year tweaks to juice demand. GM overtook Ford in 1927, and it’s a lead it holds in the US market to this day, nearly 100 years on. Ford had Lincoln, but there was a massive gulf between that luxury offshoot and the blue-collar T.

So when motorists grew a little older and a little richer, Ford had nothing to offer them – but Sloan did, with his successful mid-range marques such as Buick and Oldsmobile. Belatedly, Ford realised it was just making customers for GM as they traded up.

Ford eventually responded in 1938 with the Mercury brand, but it never really cut the mustard, and in any case war arrived soon after to curtail car production for several years.

When the company was back on an even keel in the 1950s, Ford decided that it had to do something for the mid-market once again in order to take on General Motors (and its successful Pontiac, especially), and it created Edsel.

It was a bold plan: a new brand and vehicle line-up, new production lines and 1200 new dealers recruited to sell it across America. But the design of the new cars was divisive, early quality control was poor and there was the little matter of a horrendous recession that saw new car sales drop by half, which was deadly for a new kid on the block.

But this cataclysmic cloud had a silver lining (as many tend to): the Edsel is not as well known as it should be, and all that new production capacity came in very handy just a few years later when Ford was deluged with orders for its new Mustang – which then very quickly smoothed over its forebear’s troubled legacy by becoming the world’s fastest-selling car in history.

What’s a few broken eggs when you end up with that kind of omelette?