Ford Taurus
The Ford Taurus is a full-size car that has been reintroduced to the market starting in 2010. Although Ford has chosen to name the new car Taurus it actually has little in common with it's predecessor. The original Taurus was a mid-size car that was quite innovative at the time that it was introduced. The new Taurus is a full-size car that is intended to compete at the bottom end of that market. The original Taurus was a huge success for Ford and they are clearly hoping to repeat it with the new version.
The original Ford Taurus was introduced in 1986 where it quickly became a huge success, it was the best selling car in North America for most of nineties. The original Taurus was a mid-sized economy car that introduced a number of new features to that end of the market like front wheel drive. The revolutionized the market and sent Ford's competitors scrambling to build cars to compete. In the late nineties a number of Japanese manufacturers succeeded and started to take market share away from the Taurus. Ford eventually decided that declining sales and a belief that the future was in SUV's made it a good idea to discontinue the Taurus, which they finally did in 2007. Ford introduced the Fusion to replace the Taurus in the mid-size market but eventually decided that they needed a new model for the full size market.
With Ford looking to introduce a new full-size car for 2010 they decided to resurrect the Taurus. The new Taurus is offered as either a front wheel drive or an all wheel drive model and comes with a standard 3.5 litre V6 engine. There is also a high performance version available that comes with a twin-turbocharged version of the engine. There are a number of new features included in the Taurus like adaptive cruise control and push button start, as well as Ford's multi-contour seats. The new Taurus has been generally well received but there has been some criticism of the lack of interior space for a full-size car.
The Taurus comes with all the standard safety features that would be expected of a modern car. Front and side airbags and anti-lock brakes are a given. The Taurus has performed well in front and side impact crash testing. The new Taurus comes with a number of other safety features like blind spot monitoring, a collision warning system and cross traffic alert. These are all becoming standard features on most cars and are now generally expected.
The new Taurus is part of Ford's plan to deal with their financial crises by introducing new and better quality vehicles. The Taurus uses a name from the past but it is really a new car. There have been generally positive reviews of the new Taurus but it competes in a tough segment of the market, the low end of the full size car market. Clearly Ford are hoping to have the kind of success with this Taurus that they had with the original, only time will tell if they will or not.