kansaiwalker1

Another Accord/Camry challenger bites the dust.......

Next!

nahooneyya

the only taurus worthy of talking about is the SHO....



i miss my SHO....

zeroday

yeah because ford didnt build the motor

DownUnder

Ford really needs to bring the Falcon over here NOW!

gavriil

I think the Taurus name is pretty tainted. The two good things about the Taurus is its price and overall interior and trunk space (but when compared to overall size even that's not anything to write home about). Ford needed a new name for the new product.

MSZ

They should bring all German and Aussie models here.

Water-S

the thing is yes performance is great. but you have to have quality to back that performance up. going 0-60 in 6 seconds is good in the late 80's-early 90's was a major feat but #1. concern should be will the car last 200,000 miles.
BTW:I had a friend with an 89 SHO 3.0 DOHC motor he had a Superchip and K and N filter in it. with a 6 speed. I'll admit it was fast but after 80 k it locked a main bearing up. and it's not because he was hot rodding it. just because the build quality wasn't there. yes i know the motor was designed by Yamaha. so it wasn't entirely Ford's fault. but Ford is known for cutting corners(like instead of running a stainless washer they will run a regular washer ) this is what got them in trouble with the Firestone/Ford Explorer issue. Ford asked for this cheap-ass tire with no "caps" in it. all other tire makers when they bid on it (including Goodyear and some others) said look this tire isn't heavy enough for the truck. So they said we're not gonna run the risk of possible lawsuits and etc problems. If you know anything about Firestone and Ford prior to the whole Explorer deal they had a long good relationship. so they said "ah Ford a good customer of ours. we need to keep them happy." so they built the tire. tires blew out. "
so it's not entirely Firestone's fault. they built a cheap tire like Ford wanted.

chungkopi

hallelujah!!

DownUnder

or at least have those Ford engineers from overseas smack some sense into the ones that are here.

kansaiwalker1

The real rock: Taurus just won't die off

Ford's best-selling car continues to be popular among corporate fleets and business travelers.

Jerry Garrett / New York Times

May 17, 2006

Ford has been trying to bury the Taurus, but, like the Undead in a zombie movie, the car keeps rising from the grave.

The euthanasia process has been made more difficult by the fact that the Taurus, which was expected to be comatose by now, is still showing up for work. Is it possible that this old warhorse remains Ford's best-selling passenger car?

"I guess it is," said George Pipas, a company spokesman, when asked if the Taurus' estimated 71,000 sales in the first four months of 2006 meant that it was still the most popular Ford car. (The F-150 pickup is the company's top seller overall.)

What's more, the Taurus has been available only to fleet customers, including rental agencies, since Jan. 1. "Taurus has been particularly popular with our business travelers," said Richard Broome, vice president for corporate affairs at Hertz. "It's been a reliable workhorse for us."

Taurus sales totaled 180,000 last year, but 15 percent went to retail customers. With a sticker price of $21,830 nicely equipped ($22,980 with leather seats), most appear to have been sold.

"They don't stay on our lots very long either," said Broome of Hertz, whose company sells used models after they are retired from the rental fleet. Hertz Car Sales now offers 2006 models in the $14,000 to $15,000 range and 2005s for $11,000 to $13,000. Since Hertz had bought the cars at a sizable fleet discount, Broome said they held their value well.

Ford announced last year that it was discontinuing the Taurus (and its near-twin, the Mercury Sable) and pulling the plug on the life-support machine: The cars would get no more styling changes, no more advertising or promotional support, no more sales incentives, no more retail customers. But while the Sable died last year, the Taurus soldiers on as a favorite of corporate fleets.

Through the end of April, the car was still being produced at a rate of more than 18,000 a month at an Atlanta-area plant that is on a list of factories to be closed. "We will be on that pace, more or less, at least through the second quarter and into the third quarter," Pipas said. "After that, it is TBD."

This withering away seems an inglorious end for a midsize sedan that was the nation's best-selling car in 1992-96 (the last American-brand model to earn that distinction). The Taurus has now been Ford's sales leader longer than the celebrated Model T.

Through April, total production of the Taurus, which made its debut in 1985 as an '86 model, neared 7.5 million cars, with the Sable adding another 2.1 million. As of April 3, all new Tauruses are called 2007 models. (There are no plans for an '08.)

These cars will eventually move from corporate fleets to used car lots. Keep an eye out -- in a small way, these cars will be historic even if they are never collectible.

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll...605170307/1149

phile

Ford geniuses at work: take a car that once held the sales crown, drive it to the ground, see sales tank, then ditch it.

gavriil

I am in San Fran on business since Monday and that's what Hertz gave me. I went in to ask for something else but it was the only thing available with NeverLost except for a Towncar. Totally and completely pissed off....

F23A4

I had one in Miami 3 years ago also because I asked for NeverLost, or else I could have had the then new 7G Accord or a Camry. I was smoked by an empty schoolbus while accelerating from a toll plaza on the Florida turnpike.

It was truly the most lackluster car I have driven since driving a 1995 Ford Escort while working for Hertz. (pattern?)

That said, I do recommend it for first time drivers as they are relatively cheap to acquire and insurance costs are low.

agranado

Those florida school busses dont fuck around...

F23A4

....it was U N R E A L how little power that Taurus had.

Edward'TLS

For the SHO Taurus, the 3L V6 Yamaha engine was very reliable. However, the 3.4L V8 Yamaha engine (replacing the V6) was a nightmare. The engine would virtually self-destruct after accumulated a certain mileage because the sprocket slipped on the camshaft causing valve heads crash. Worst still, Ford was not acknowledging the problem, so the affected owners were left hanging out. So many well-informed owners paid out of their own pockets to weld the sprocket onto the camshalf before the engine started killing itself. But still, even though the engine is build by Yamaha, Ford is not doing anything to support its SHO owners.

charliemike

Don't EVER buy a car that is sold for fleet units.

GreenMonster

Ford does this all the time... I had an new escort loaner a couple years ago even tho' they didn't make 'em for the public... I thought it was odd to have a new discontinued car...

S A CHO

This man speaks the truth.


On topic: If the Taurus is doing relitivley well in the business world, why kill it totally?

Sarlacc

GM is doing it with the Malibu Classic.

RWalker2

A car even worse than the Taurus, imo.

F23A4

....then you should have seen the Tempo.

M TYPE X

The Malibu Classic is dead, GM had the plant idled a while ago.

The Taurus IS the modren-day "Model T." Even better, it's the same letter!

RWalker2

I might be young, but I have. My friends older sister had one. Not something I think I'd like to ride in again

F23A4

My mother in law bought an 89 Tempo GL new back in 1988 and pretty much drove it until it died 2 years ago. That was one car that made public transportation preferrable.

Sarlacc

I think I would take just about any GM car over a ford car for a rental.

M TYPE X

Tempos suck. Well, more than just that. They suck as a verb, but intrinsically, they are also their own category of suckworthiness.

kansaiwalker1

October 28, 2006

End of the Line for Ford Taurus

By MICHELINE MAYNARD

DETROIT, Oct. 27 — The Ford Taurus is dead. Long live the Taurus?

This week produced one of those stranger-than-fiction moments in Ford’s history: the last Taurus rolled off the assembly line Friday, in the same week that Ford’s new chief executive, Alan R. Mulally, said the struggling company needed to transform itself with grand new ambitions — the same kind of ambitions that gave birth to the Taurus, which became the symbol of American automotive renaissance when it first went on sale in 1985.

The storyline is even more ironic, given that Mr. Mulally, as a top executive at Boeing, used the development of the Taurus as an inspirational case study for his team as they overhauled the way that Boeing built planes.

And, in a sense, he is doing the same again. “Ford’s on a new plan,” Mr. Mulally said last week. “We’re in business to create value.”

Yet, there is a deflating lesson in the way Ford allowed the Taurus to lose its value after creating a brand that became a legend.

Two decades back, Taurus “was a huge win, not just for Ford, but for the home team,” said Karl Brauer, editor in chief of Edmunds.com, which offers car-buying advice. “Here was an American car that was scoring so well with American consumers.”

In its 20 years on the market, Ford sold more than seven million Taurus cars, and millions more of its sister model, the Mercury Sable.

While they look almost mundane now, both Taurus and Sable boasted a revolutionary aerodynamic styling at the time. Taurus, in particular, touched a nerve in Americans who had grown tired of square cars whose personality had been drained away as Detroit focused more on meeting fuel economy standards than on bold design.

But Ford — because of later choices on where to put its product development dollars and a redesign that alienated customers — could not keep its appeal alive. So the plant in Atlanta that built the Taurus will close next week, part of the overhaul plan that Ford hopes will reverse one of the worst financial crises in its 103-year history.

Mr. Mulally is trying to focus on the future, and in less than a month on the job has set out a series of goals very close to what Ford tried to do with that original Taurus.

They include trying to captivate the American public with innovative design, streamlining its manufacturing processes and involving the United Automobile Workers union in trying to rally a company brought to its knees by foreign competition and a product lineup that is losing market share for Ford.

The Taurus broke the old mold of car development in Detroit, where designers passed off their ideas to engineers, who threw them over the wall to manufacturing experts, who never talked to the marketing staff. Instead, Taurus got everyone in a room together, creating a new paradigm that companies rushed to copy.

Mr. Mulally was not far behind. In the early 1990s, he borrowed ideas from Team Taurus to develop the Boeing 777 long-range jet. More recently, he also used those lessons to help create the medium-range 787, nicknamed the Dreamliner, which may turn out to be as big a hit for Boeing as the Taurus was for Ford.

But as others started copying Ford, the company grew distracted over the last 10 years — first by efforts to globalize its product development, assigning different sizes of cars to different parts of the world, and then by its efforts to dominate the sport utility market at the expense of cars like the Taurus.

Once consumers began losing interest in S.U.V.s this decade, Ford started losing its dominant hold on the marketplace.

Mr. Mulally, in a memo to employees this month, said he was determined to help Ford “restake our claim as history’s best example of a company that enriches the lives of all its stakeholders: investors, customers, dealers, suppliers, employees, our union partners and the countries and communities in which we live.”

But analysts said the strategy this time would not be to gamble big on a car like the Taurus — the equivalent of a moon shot. Rather, they said, the company needs a succession of well-thought-out cars that will be profitable at lower sales levels. That very much describes the product strategy that Mr. Mulally put in place for Boeing (in marked contrast to Airbus’s big bet on the A380 double-decker plane).

Given the fierce competition and rising market share of foreign companies, Mr. Mulally cannot count on the 400,000 sales per year that the Taurus generated in its heyday.

That spot is already taken by the Toyota Camry, followed closely by the Honda Accord, meaning other automakers must be satisfied with smaller numbers. Instead, Mr. Mulally has to concentrate on lesser but steadier hits rather than a roll of the dice, said John Paul MacDuffie, a professor at the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ford will have trouble replicating the splash that it made when it introduced the Taurus, which was featured on magazine covers and populated Detroit freeways in its early months. Ford, in fact, sent 100 Taurus cars in a caravan down Jefferson Avenue in downtown Detroit, proudly showing off its new wheels to competitors.

Lately, Ford executives have made much of the Edge, a crossover vehicle that made its debut last week on the streets of San Francisco, where the company invited journalists to drive it and gauge bystanders’ response.

On Monday, Ford said it had received 20,000 advance orders for the Edge, but that was just a fraction of the 103,000 advance orders that customers placed in 1985 for the Taurus and its sister car, the Mercury Sable.

Besides the Edge, Ford is introducing a new Super Duty version of its F-series pickup next year, just when G.M. and Toyota will have new trucks. And Ford officials are promising a new iteration of the Mustang each year. But the real muscle in its lineup does not come until later on this decade, when Ford overhauls the basic F-series and plans to introduce a small car.

For now, the Edge takes center stage but it is entering a segment of the market already populated with crossover vehicles, which are essentially sport utilities based on the underpinnings of a car.

It cannot claim to be first to that market — nor can it claim to be directly challenging a small group of Japanese models, as the Taurus did two decades ago when it took on the Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord.

Yet such smaller bets are safer for Mr. Mulally at this point, analysts said, until he instills the kind of discipline, business plan and production processes that he wants the company to follow.

This week, Mr. Mulally said he was actually glad that Ford was not a well-oiled machine. “Can you imagine if we were already lean? It would be terrifying,” he said, because that would not allow him any room for improvement.

For its part, the Taurus does offers an example of a mistake that Ford would be wise not to repeat — namely in the way it largely abandoned the car when S.U.V.’s became popular, Professor MacDuffie said.

After a radical redesign in 1996 that failed to catch on with consumers, Ford shifted its resources into developing sport utilities, a move that allowed Camry to grab the top-selling car spot, which it has yielded just once to the Accord.

The latest Camry, introduced this spring, won good reviews for its fresh, modern look and smooth ride at a time when Ford was preparing to put Taurus out to pasture.

“American companies have not been as good at staying focused and keeping consistent,” Professor MacDuffie said. “They do tend to jump around to whatever looks like it is going to be the most profitable.”

He said he was encouraged that Mr. Mulally was “signaling the need for focus.”

“He’s shown in his background, not only in the things he’s said, that he understands the need for strong products that are strongly manufactured,” Professor MacDuffie said. “And the strong products are clearly the ones that are selling well.”

That would be encouraging to Ford workers, currently deciding whether they want to accept buyouts and incentives to retire. Mr. Mulally said he understood their trepidation about the future. “It will take a while to go back up again,” he said last week.

“It’s just like at Boeing, where people said, ‘Will you tell us when we’ll be halfway done with the movie, so we can go out for popcorn? Can you tell us when we’ll all be able to see it?’ ”

At Ford’s Atlanta plant, where the last Taurus rolled off the line at 7:25 a.m. Friday, the local union president, Steve Stephens, said he was encouraging workers to remain upbeat despite the impending shutdown.

“We stood out,” Mr. Stephens said. “It’s something we’re going to tell our grandkids about, that we were part of the evolution in the automotive industry.”

Nick Bunkley contributed reporting.

Crazy Bimmer

I took pic at the henry Ford Museum

S A CHO

Heres a little video of what aired on ABC a couple days ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwuCm8hNXgI

I cant quite say if it's a good move just yet, but I know my cars value just went up .08 cents

LuvMyTSX

Thank God. The Taurus, IMO, is way past its prime. Hopefully they can come up with something decent to replace it.

phile

Memories...I had a Taurus like that, I think it was either gray or blue, and it took me from high school to the first 2 or 2 years of college. Ran pretty well actually.

heyitsme

When people don't even know the Fusion has taken over the Taurus spot its pretty sad. Or the Taurus was really that big, haha.

Infamous425

good riddance! i had one for a rental before and for a vehicle that size it has less rear legroom than the new civic. seats were flat and hard as cardboard. and way underpowered v6

gavriil

Thank God!!! I just cant accept many more at Hertz while on business, either in the east or the west coasts. I just came back this past Friday from San Fran driving one for a whole week. What a poor, poor product!

gavriil

The replacement has already taken place. The "next Taurus" was the Fusion and the 500. Ford believed that there was room for a smaller and a larger sedan but not one in the dimesions of a next gen. Taurus. The verdict is out and one is doing well, the other not (Fusion/500 accordingly).

vishnus11

Thankgod its dead.

F23A4

It really is a sad commentary that Ford was not able to further "develop" the Taurus in the same way Honda did the Accord and Toyota the Camry.

When I was a Hertz vehicle transporter back in the mid-90s, I must have driven hundreds of miles in the Taurus and its Sable counterpart. Although the only Tauri I liked were the SHO models, the Taurus/Sables were cars that I unregrettably NEVER considered as a personal purchase.

But as far a basic transportation went (particularly for its class), it was hard to beat in terms of value.

LuvMyTSX

LOL....yeah, those aren't the same size as the Taurus, so I didn't know they were the replacements. Ha.

gavriil

Taurus Line Worker Loses Job, Hits Lottery - - Source: The Car Connection