DeSoto To DeLorean – 14 Defunct Car Brands (& How They Failed)

Automobile enthusiasts around the world know brands like Studebaker, Plymouth and Packard, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any of these on the roads today. Former powerhouses in the American auto market, as Visual Capitalists’s Chris Matei notes, they have since become beloved by collectors, but lost to the general public.
Today’s infographic comes from TitleMax and it looks at 14 now-defunct car brands and the circumstances that took them from highways to bygones.
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These are only a selection of a much longer list of car brands that have not survived to see the present day. What accounts for the churn rate of these brands?
BOLD EXPERIMENTS, BOONDOGGLES, AND BURNOUTS Some car brands, like Tucker and Saturn, introduced new ideas that the market simply didn’t care for, didn’t perform as well as the competition, or were too ambitious for the industry climate. Others, like Edsel and DeLorean, met swift ends as they hemorrhaged money far faster than their owners anticipated. Even more brands were simply folded into the ever-expanding portfolios of either Ford or General Motors, the two biggest auto conglomerates ever to rule the roads.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jul 1, 2017.