The 2010 Taurus: A classic redesign, or the same old bull?

The 2010 Ford Taurus SHO. The 90s never looked so good.

by Jeffery Racheff

If you were alive during the ’90s, there’s a pretty good chance you rode in a Ford Taurus. Haters called it a “Flying Jelly Bean” when it debuted in 1986 because of its bulbous, bug-eyed appearance, yet car buyers embraced it wholeheartedly. From 1992 to 1996, it was the best selling car in America, parking itself in almost half a million driveways in that first year alone.

Then, America’s favorite sedan fell by the wayside. By ‘96 designers began sculpting increasingly oblong shapes that made them look like futuristic potatoes (apparently a fashionable automotive look of the time), and consumers responded by drifting towards smaller, cheaper, more intelligent-looking Japanese automobiles. Meanwhile, the Taurus itself faded into a weird rental car oblivion. It became virtually inseparable from airport pickups and repair shop replacements, a reputation that may have boded well for sales to Avis and Enterprise, but to the average consumer it was quite the turn-off. So the Taurus struggled in rental fleet purgatory until plans came down to retire it in 2007.