With winter coming, I found myself needing a winter beater car. The answer was found in a car that had a rich history with my family. It was also a car that tried to kill me a few years prior. Still, the price was right, so I was willing to over look that misstep.
This Ford Taurus station wagon had been selected by my father brand new. While he will claim he is not a Ford man (or a car guy at all) a majority of his cars have worn a blue oval. This particular car was initially a company perk for him. He worked for an oil and gas company at the time and they offered him a company car: anything he wanted under generous price cap. All associated costs like maintenance, fuel and insurance would be paid for. As a young adult I unsuccessfully lobbied him on something glitzy and impractical. How many times in your life could you buy that high upkeep luxury liner and have someone else foot the running costs? Or indulge in a gas guzzler? Most of his peers had chosen German sedans or luxuriously trimmed American SUVs. My father, ever the accountant, selected this much more modest station wagon. After the executive car program was discontinued, he purchased it outright.
The Taurus arrived after I had moved out of the family home, so I did not get to drive it much but there was one particularly memorable occasion. I was moving back to school after the summer break which involved lugging my meagre belongings over a two-hour highway drive. The spacious Taurus wagon made the perfect hauler, so there I was cruising at an easy 110km/h down the highway. This particular Taurus has electrical motors to adjust the front seats fore and aft; suddenly they sprang into action all by themselves, moving the driver’s seat forward and my knees into the dashboard. I have never been so glad to have an automatic transmission as I am not sure I could have pressed both a brake and clutch pedal in the sort of fetal yoga position into which the possessed seat had forced me. I managed to bring the car to a stop on the shoulder where I was able to disentangle myself. The seat was easily moved back to a more normal position and I gingerly set off again. Despite my trepidation, this particular electrical gremlin never reoccurred.
Several years later, the Taurus was passed on to my younger brother. He, his wife and daughter moved to Arizona to further his education in heath food nutrition and preparation. There they lived outside in a tent for several weeks until spring flood waters washed it away. The ever-faithful Taurus was then pressed into use as short-term housing, but even after it went back to serving as mere transportation, it still had a rough life with the red Arizona sand getting everywhere. My brother is good at a lot of things, but being auto repair is not one of them, so any issues that arose forced him to rely on local mechanics of varied quality. The Taurus was able to make it back to Canada in one piece, but didn’t idle quite right.
My brother had moved on to a Toyota van that had been imported, so the Taurus was no longer required. I, on the other hand, was in need of a winter beater over the following few months and was dreading the usual fleecing by a mechanic on the mandatory insurance inspection. There was, however, a way around it. A car new enough did not require such an inspection. Depending on the insurance company, cars under ten (or thirteen) years old were exempt. I usually didn’t have the cash or desire to purchase such a new vehicle, but my brother’s Taurus had enough issues that it could be purchased cheaply. So I became the owner of a Ford Taurus station wagon for the second time.
The biggest issue was that the whole car was covered in a layer of very fine red dirt including the engine. I carefully cleaned everything but the lumpy idle remained. I suspected the air flow sensor had been compromised by the Arizona dust. A shot of electrical cleaner helped a bit and was an encouraging enough sign for me to replace the sensor. While it did not completely cure the issue, it was almost invisible to anyone but me.
The 3.0L V6 was now at least presentable looking and running well. Luckily I’d been able to convince my father to at least spring for the more modern, dual overhead cam Duratec engine over the pushrod Vulcan engine. While its large physical size makes maintenance quite a bit more tricky, it pumped out a rather lusty 200hp. It truly felt like a lovely engine in search of complementary chassis.
The next problem to sort was a bit more of a stinker. Literally. My brother and his wife had lived and cooked in the car which likely didn’t help, but they were also great fans of essential oils. The car had … a strong aroma even with the windows down. Several treatments of carpet cleaner, Febreze and driving around with all the windows down for a month moved the Taurus’s interior to a more neutral smell.
It is hard to talk the interior without at least mentioning the oval overload dashboard. While it was a little shocking when new. I really did not have a problem with it in day-to-day use. Controls were laid out logically. The only real issue I could see is for the owner who wanted an after-market stereo. I generally do not keep vehicles long enough to invest in upgraded sound.
I received a fair amount of good-natured teasing from my co-workers over that Breastfeeding license plate frame until I swapped over to my own license plate. The car had a fair number of scrapes, bumps and bruises which I decided to leave alone. The metallic paint, while nice when new, would have been tough to nicely match on a low budget.
I drove the Taurus for almost a year and it was an exceptionally reliable and pleasant companion. Compared to the smaller vehicles I usually drove, it was a bit of a treat to drive a big, floaty car with a column shifter. I cannot recall exactly why I sold it, but I was probably ready to experience something different. Oddly enough, I managed to sell it on for exactly what I had bought it for. Can’t complain about that.
I had a ’96 Sable wagon for a while, with the Vulcan engine. It was a very likeable car, right up until the head gasket blew.
You may want it, or something like it, again some day. These are versatile and pleasant cars, which often is not noticed until they’re just a memory.
Its nose still looks like a fish, though it is more distinctive than more mainstream look of its successor beginning in 2000.
There are reasons to carp about the styling.
To me the 53 Buick is a fish.
The Taurus/ Sable belong on every frugal person’s short list. I was awfully close in getting one. It would have been a later model with the Duratec, very much like yours. But after 9 years of driving Windstar I needed real change.
Taurus are hard to find in decent condition where the DOT sprinkles the its magic potion during the winter months. The red dust might have been your beater’s salvation from salvage.
You did a nice job cleaning it up by the way.
I guess I’m frugal, then. My wife and I have been driving Tauri and Sables since the early 1990s…all but one of them wagons.
It is a shock to us California residents to visit relatives in Pennsylvania and see cars like ours, still running but well into the progress of entropic conversion to brown flakes. It is a reminder of how much money we DON’T have to spend by living where we do, taking care of our cars, and not having to keep buying new ones every time the rust cancer becomes terminal.
CC effect strikes again,I’ve just seen one blown up in CSI.Your incident with the front seat seems like something from Christine.
Can we hear more about the imported Van?
I too would like to hear more about the van. Great story about the Taurus wagon but seeing that clean JDM van has got me all riled up. What a beautiful piece of forbidden fruit for us U.S. readers!
I believe it was a TownAce. The van was front wheel drive and powered by a diesel four cylinder engine. There was an awd variant available. It was also saddled with an automatic gearbox so no real performance. They bought from a pilot and it had crazy low mileage on it – something like 20k kms. It had a bell that dinged if you drove over 90km/h. They removed that quickly. They drove it a lot over the years and it was reasonably reliable for them. Eventually got flooded out in the Calgary flooding last year and sadly they scrapped it.
Thanks! It should be RWD, though. As the original owner of a 1984 Toyota Van, I am SUPREMELY jealous of Canda’s 15 yr import rule vs 25 for the US. These Hiace/Townace vans are high on my list of cool cars that I wish I could more easily get.
Really just a pipedream, though. Thanks for the followup
Definitely front wheel drive. They made them that way as well for the home market.
The design part I’ve never liked is the way the C-pillar and the 3rd window meet each other. I realize the effort was to keep the over-killed oval theme intact, but it looks really awkward and makes it butt heavy. It’s too bad Ford didn’t spend any money to resolve some of the wagon design issues when they came out with the 2000 redesign.
To some the front looks like a fish, or some sort of amphibian. I think it’s got a bit of a child-like Pokemon design to it.
Definitely a case of “crap we need to make a wagon version how do we handle the C pillar and keep the sedan’s rear doors”. The Wagon did keep the most of its unique rear parts when the redesign came around but they did that with the original too, just not enough sales to justify new tooling for the wagon specific pieces, but at the time enough volume to justify offering it in the first place.
My biggest beef with the wagon design-wise was the rear hatch. It too was ovoid, and made loading a pain in the ass for larger objects. A 4 foot wide piece of plywood was simply impossible. Things might have been easier if the hatch opening wrapped around the sides of the rear fenders. The separately opening rear glass was a nice touch.
Once you were inside, there was plenty of room despite all the roundness. I could haul a fair sized load, but getting it in- and out- was harder than it needed to be.
Hey look it is the 1961 Plymouth Valiant of our generation! I still feel urges to turn one of these into a sculpture. What an interesting story and makes me glad I had a 95 Voyager to live in for three weeks, but where were your relatives living? Phoenix even in October is borderline too hot to sleep in your vehicle.
Some Asian students living opposite me have a one of these in sedan it disappeared recently on a flat bed but its back and runs as it moves now and then but has been relisted on Trademe last time they were seeking nearly 4k now its down to $1500 still too much but I guess one day someone will bite.
The last gen Ford Scorpio (mid-nineties) had a fish look too. But the rest of the wagon was pretty conventional. This model was the last big Euro Ford.
They laid another fish egg in Australia with the AU Falcon. Horrible ovoid styling which compromised rear seat access, and killed sales. The later BA model fixed the styling to some extent by reinventing the straight line, but sales never recovered to what they had been before the Ovaltheme overkill.
Ford laid an egg – this failed redesign is a definite deadly sin.
Way overwrought, overweight and decidedly overpriced. Ford thought they could price it around $25k and the market laughed out loud.
A genuine flop which killed the Taurus franchise and made it rental car fodder.
Gee, that’s funny. Not only did that flop get sold from ’96 to ’07, but there is one hell of a lot of them still out there.
Not funny. Tragic.
The Taurus had been the best selling car until the redesign. Ford wanted to move upmarket, something it’s still trying to do. Instead they had to drop something like 50%+ into fleets. That’s why they’re cheap – no resale value.
After the redesign, Toyota/Camry and Honda/Accord waved goodbye to Ford in the rear view mirror.
Though a resounding failure, the lack or resale value has made the unfortunate looking 1996+ Ford/Taurus a cheap ride if nothing else.
Actually Ford stole the title of best selling “car” from themselves with the Explorer which quickly became the best selling passenger vehicle and the 3rd best selling vehicle overall. However I do agree that they made the Taurus just to radical to have mainstream acceptance and that killed the name. Ford had it right in killing the name and it was a mistake to rename the Five Hundred the Taurus. Mullaly was infatuated with the first generation Taurus and the success Ford had with it though he failed to understand that the bubble killed the equity that the Taurus name had.
Unfortunately the poor reception that the bubble Taurus received meant that they went way too bland with the 500 hampering its potential.
Perhaps if the 3rd gen Taurus/Sable looked more like the Five Hundred/Montego, which would’ve been both a more gradual evolution from the 1st and 2nd gen Taurii, and been a design that would’ve been warmly received in ’96 rather than the collective yawn it generated in 2005.
Glad I saw this – I’m about to buy a nice 2001 Sable to replace my ailing Regal. I owned a 92 sedan and beat the hell out of it.
I had a ’99 Sable wagon for several years. As a car, I liked it OK, but the upkeep costs nickel and dimed me to death.
Do your best make absolutely sure that the transmission is in good condition. That’s the weakest spot on one of these, and mine cost me rather a lot to rebuild just months after buying the car. Admittedly, I had mine ‘bullet-proofed’, which added to the cost, but I had no further problems for 120K miles.
Overall, they’re a pretty decent drive. The quality is good, ride and handling passable. I didn’t like the brakes.
A friend of mine once remarked that Ford engineers were shooting at the Citroen CX as a benchmark. They were considering they had achieved success if they had gotten 60% of the way there. I thought that curious, seeing as I had the Sable and a CX Prestige. I don’t think they hit their 60%, but then again, the CX is a pretty lofty bar to hurdle.
Thanks for the advice. Knowing what I know, the car will get a transmission clean-out first thing and a new filter. I was really hard on my 92 and it had awful suspension issues but now that I’m in the city – on paved roads – I don’t forsee any issues. And I know the engine will be more bulletproof than the 3.1 GM I have now.
That haunted seat is kind of fishy. If I was the only one driving, I think I would pull the fuse or unplug the motor for peace of mind. I had a 73 Beetle’s steering lock cylinder pin engage just as I was pulling into a parking spot and the wheel locked with engine running. What if I was on the freeway or a windy road? I pulled the wheel and cut off the pin with a hacksaw blade and after that had a non locking steering column. I would have never felt safe if I just replaced the lock assembly, even though I never heard of it happening to anyone else.
Maybe others weren’t quite so fortunate to walk away? Scary thought.
Other then the questionable looks of the 1996-199 and 2000-2007(Yes they offered the 4th gen Taurus to 2007 but you could only buy one through fleet sales) and questionable radio(radio was in the trunk and the unit with the tape deck was the control head which made for a pain in the @$$ expense when adding an aftermarket unit in) it was a nice car to own if you wanted a larger roomy comfy car to drive. Cheap to buy new and cheaper to buy used.
The Duratec engine was really rubbish and a pain in the back end to do any work on. It leaked oil and coolant and suffered from vacuum leaks. At the Ford dealer I worked at it was customary to give the newest tech the “honor” of diagnosing one of these “tecs”
The Vulcan was slower but reasonably reliable and easy enough to work on.
Folks give the Taurus and sable a hard time but as homely most of them give their owners many miles of trouble free driving(and that is what most folks want.)
My wife drives a 98 Sable wagon, bought 2006, now at 189,000 miles on the Vulcan. Once you get that Ford installed maze of coolant hoses along the firewall and put in something that corrected the Ford induced problem you were almost good to go. There is still, to this day, the problem with the brown coolant in less than a year. Before long you would rot out your vanes on the water pump. That would be followed by an overheat condition that was tough on cylinder #1 usually cracking it somewhere. If you can stay on top of your coolant flushes and transmission oil changes this car is a decent long time runner. Here is my first experience with the water pump issue in 2006. Live and learned well.
That 3.0L Duratec got the chassis it deserved in the Mazda6. Mazda-designed heads gave it another 20 hp, and the manual transmission in a 3,100 lb car made it quite entertaining. My only issue was that it had a 5 speed and top gear was too short. There was no need for that car to be pulling 3,000 RPM at freeway speeds.
Mazda tends to do that with all their cars. The modern 2 and 3 are too shortly geared. I don’t get it. I’d rather have a nice deep overdrive 5th and downshift to 4th when needed.
Agree on the 3. I find myself starting in second and wishing my ’06 had a sixth. But then I live in the country, and high-speed cruising matters more than the stoplight grand prix.
The low gearing is what gives them their Zoom-Zoom. Mazda has done that since the 80’s, on many cars which were shared with Ford the Mazda would have a lower final drive ratio than the similar Ford.
My “Mom” had a ’96 Taurus SHO that they got three months old that was formerly an executive demo for at the time Ford CEO Alex Trotman. That car was.. brilliant. I mean really, we were all extremely surprised with it. When you complain about the chassis of the wagon and the Duratec being saddled to it, the SHO fixed all that, it was what every Taurus aside from the fleet model should have been, a car that truly felt half as small as it was. It replaced a ’93 Mazda 626 ES and it felt more nimble.. no, really.
Dad was picking up his newly-ordered ’97 F-150 XLT, one of the first in the state of the new design, and they had the SHO in the garage for detailing as we walked out. I was pretty amazed by how good it looked considering all the other new Taurii I had seen were, well, “unique”. As we were waiting for the F-150 to get prepped after Dad gave it the nod, we asked about trying out the SHO. Still remember with the whole family in it Dad giving it the beans on a rural Nebraska highway and I said something to the effect of “well, that’s not bad” to which he responded “yeah, we’re doing 105..”. It was a car that just loved to.. go.
Of course that one was saddled by the infamous cam issues with the 3.4 Yamaha V8. “Mom’s” SHO became Dad’s shortly after the motor grenaded and was replaced under extended warranty by Ford. At the time the motor wasn’t available as a crate replacement, so the dealership had to order it in part by part to build. Guy who built it also had a supercharged Mustang he liked to street race, and three months after the new motor was put in the SHO became Dad’s when be bought Mom a ’01 Mustang GT for Christmas. There was a direct correlation between how well that SHO moved with the new motor and the Mustang.
A long story, but really, that was a car that never (in my mind) got the justice it deserved. It would easily put 5 liter Mustangs to shame from the stoplight, and definitely lose them in the twisties. It would also cruise with extreme comfort at 90 on the interstate all day long.
After a transmission went shortly after the new motor (coincidence??) Dad had already expressed some doubts about the long term reliability of it, and how he missed a pickup. Mom surprised him a year after he got her the Mustang with a F-150 for Christmas, that she traded the SHO in on. As much as he liked the F-150 – he still has it to this day – I think he still misses that SHO. He had a string of fast Mazdas before it, but he said the SHO definitely out-does all of them.
If the tech was that good why didn’t he pin the cam sprockets when he was building it?
From what I read, the original engine failed, not the one which was rebuilt at the dealer. Another fix was to weld the sprockets to the hollow camshafts at three or four points.
What can I say? The closest I’ve ever gotten to this was a 2002-ish Taurus sedan that a college classmate drove and which I borrowed. To say I wasn’t impressed with it is an understatement. My mother had a 1997 Maxima which felt a bit flimsy compared to the Taurus but was otherwise much more precise and sprightly, not to mention better put together.
It’s odd, then, to find myself actually liking your wagon. I understand that the ’96-’99 Taurus was overwrought and malproportioned. BUT, it was cohesive and the details were handled very nicely (compare its doorhandles to a Lumina’s, for instance). And I think the initial sedan variants and the wagons were food looking; only the Sable rubbed me the wrong way.
My point is, there’s something about the failed third-gen Taurus/Sable that I like. I suppose it’s mainly that it was clearly very ambitious and the quality was mostly there. Compare it to a bucket-o-bolts Intrepid or one of the solid-but-crude GM W-bodies, and it certainly seems that Ford did its homework. If only the cars that came out of the endeavor weren’t so overweight and numb at the helm. Perhaps Ford should’ve adapted the nixed the six-passenger consideration and adapted the Contour’s platform to suit the mid-sized market (not being a Ford engineer, I can’t speak to how feasible this was).
It’s not RX7, so it’s obviously one of the most dull of Dave Saunders’s cars, but I’ll always have a degree of respect for the ’96-’99 Taurus, even if I’d choose a Maxima or Grand Prix or Contour (or a four-cyl stick Accord or Altima or Legacy) instead.
With but a couple of dozen miles on both first and second generation Tarurus’ I don’t have a definitive feel for either. But the second generation I couldn’t even get started because of some goofy lockout until my Dad, who’s car it was, told me the trick. Now I was in my 40s by then, no kid, dozens of cars to my name let alone that I’ve driven. Whatever.
The real story is I knew a number of people over the years that had one or the other. The first generation, kind of an Audi knockoff at the time, was universally loved. People really liked driving those cars. Perhaps like the Volvo 240 series, not much on paper, but people loved them. Second generation Taurus, I never heard that.