Today it's hard to recall what a leap forward the Ford Taurus was when it was first introduced for the 1986 model year. Front-drive sedans and wagons weren't anything new in America back then, but Ford was the first domestic manufacturer to unapologetically push its advantages by designing a car that was sleek, aerodynamic, eminently practical and shockingly roomy. This wasn't a front-driver that cloaked its technology under square-cut sheet metal, a landau roof and whitewall tires. The Ford Taurus looked like the future because it was the future.
That first Ford Taurus looked better to buyers and backed it up by being better, too. But while the Taurus quickly became America's best-selling car, the competition — particularly the Japanese competition — wasn't sitting still. And even after a 1992 cosmetic refreshing, by the early '90s the Ford Taurus was becoming a generic commodity: an interchangeable appliance as likely to be bought by a public utility as a retail consumer.
Unfortunately the ovoid redesign of the Ford Taurus for 1996 proved to be disastrous. With its melted appearance and drooping rear deck, the 1996 Taurus tried hard to set itself apart from the mainstream sedan pack. But Ford hadn't spent the money for a new platform and the Taurus was lagging dynamically and just plain weird-looking. Heavily subsidized fleet sales kept it the best-selling car in America for 1996, but retail sales of the Taurus virtually collapsed. During 1997 the Ford Taurus lost its title as America's best-selling car.
The Ford Taurus was redesigned again for the 2000 model year with many of the design tweaks there to mitigate the ovoid silliness of the 1996 model. But it still wasn't the full-bore effort Ford needed to make to keep up with the ever-improving Japanese competition, and the Taurus languished. After the 2007 model year, the Ford Taurus was allowed to die.
But the Ford Taurus name still had cachet and immense name recognition. So new Ford CEO Alan Mullaly did the obvious thing and renamed the Five Hundred sedan the Taurus for 2008. And when the Ford Taurus was handsomely redesigned for 2010, it became Ford's flagship domestic sedan.
