Roy Brown Jr., the designer responsible for a number of Ford's best love classic models, has died at the age of 96, according to The Inquisitor.

While he had many successes during his long and industrious career in car design, he is perhaps best known for creating the Ford Edsel, which is regularly cited as being the biggest flop ever to emerge from Detroit.

Built in the 1950s, to take on the competing models from General Motors, the Edsel was well received on its initial release but later came under heavy criticism as a result of quality issues, since it was essentially cobbled together from bits of other Ford cars.

Brown Jr. expressed his pride in the design of the Edsel before his death and in fact owned his own version, which he used on the roads right up until the last years of his life.

A variety of Edsel iterations were released, including the Ford Corsair, Ranger and Villager, although this was not enough to save it from failure.

When he made the transition to the UK in the early 1960s, Brown Jr. managed to get back on track by creating the hugely popular Cortina, which was one of the biggest sellers of its day and remains a popular classic model.