One complaint. The cup holders are a disaster. You can’t get a big cup into them without fouling the shift lever. You also bash your knuckles on the decorative cover when you try to put a small cup into the holders. The rear cup holder on the center console has two places for cups. You can’t fit two cups in the space.

The adaptive cruise control is outstanding. I drove over 150 miles without touching the gas or brake. You cannot believe how well it works! The blind spot indicators are excellent. Very few false hits.

The NAV system with the weather map overlay on the route is neat and great in winter.

The massage seats are cutsey. It feels like someone is poking you in the back where you don’t want to be poked.
Like all new cars the owner’s manual is awful. All of the intformation is there but hard to find.

This is a big, powerful road car with a ton of luxury features for a very good price.

….wait for it….

$47,000.00 MSRP.

They did a comparo between the SHO and the G37 Journey, in which case the Infinity, at $4k cheaper, trounced the expensive Taurus.

Has FoMoCo lost its collective mind?

Anyway, in NO WAY is this a *real* SHO.

It is far too big.
…far too heavy.
It has no Yamaha engine.
It has no manual transmission.

Frankly, Ford couldn’t build a *real* SHO if they wanted to. They are too busy copying Toyota’s level of excitement…and Toyota’s are about as fun as having Swine Flu.

Ford knows that this car is going to flop…it’s not even on sale yet and ALREADY the Ford X-Plan site is showing a $2000 rebate on ALL 2010 Taurus’. There’s a bold move for ya…

The reality was that the market for the original SHO just wasn’t there. (And the V-8 powered successor was pathetic — inferior in every performance spec. to the original and with a slushbox to boot.)

This car looks like an effort to avoid the mistakes of the original. The engine may be extreme, but the rest of the car is not. The one weakness in the original SHO was the brakes — the discs would warp after an enthusiastic drive through the mountains.. I was fortunate to find a SHO-modifier who sold better quality metal discs and pads, although the brakes were still a little small. It was possible to fit larger discs but that required more work, including replacing spindles.

I do not understand the attitude of Detroit in skimping on brakes for their cars. The Ford rep’s comment shows he’s still got old Detroit-think on the brain. How much can it cost to put in properly-sized brakes, with discs made of decent-quality metal? I realize that some foreign manufacturers cheap out on brakes, too (Honda/Acura comes to mind), but driving a car that stops reliably, predictably and quickly all of the time, under all conditions, is a real pleasure . . . and I’m no autocrosser or track jockey.

Oh please stop bad mouthing Ford again. Remember one of the great American cars that are still on the road or should I say an American company.

Susan W. I am from Mass. Is that true? I know New Englanders hate having trees to be cut down and now contaminating the drinking water is more like to be a very big issue for the people of Massachusetts.

Remember the movie by John Travolta, contaminated water in Woburn,Ma?
Class action suit again will see

http://www.truedelta.com/comparisons1/LaCrosse-vs-Taurus-price-comparison.php

The Taurus is longeramd wider on the outside, and this pays off in a much larger trunk. But the interior dimensions are about the same–except the Buick ha 2.4 inches more rear legroom, a larger difference.

Interior quality is a matter of the finishes and the precision with which the bits come together. To give you one example, in the new Taurus the pieces of the trim on the inner door panel do not fit precisely, by design. The diameters where they come together aren’t quite the same, and the edges that meet leave a gap between them.

To give another, as in the MKS the center console trim has an overly flat and plastic look to it. They need to finesse the shape more, especially at the edges.

However, the question that really comes to mind is how does someone judge interior quality? There seem to be some hard rules, hard plastic is bad, leather is better than cloth which is better than vinyl, although convincing ‘leatherette’ might sometimes be better than cloth, real wood is better than fake wood, unless you can’t tell the difference, grained polymers are better than shiny, gaps should be kept to a minimum, and moving mechanisms should move with a certain weight. There are also a lot of things people just can’t come to a consensus on, such as lots of buttons vs few buttons, metal trim vs wood trim, shiny polished interior surfaces vs matte finish, individual displays for different functions vs a unified display, red vs blue vs green vs white for gauge backlighting, thumb vs index finger actuated shift levers, nav up high or shielded/shaded down below, and a whole host of others.

Performance is fairly easy to quantify, 0 – 60 times are cut and dry as are skid pad numbers. Drag coefficeints and milers per gallon have standards which can be measured, and interior space, though as you note numbers can be fudged, can at least be measured. When it comes to overall interior ‘quality’ however, a lot comes down to person preference.

The only niggles I have with the 2010 Taurus are that the trunk release button is for some reason located on the passenger side of the center console, the headliner is made of light fabric even in black interior cars, and the interior door panels aren’t as padded as those of the MKS. Aside from that the quality of the leather is excellent, the gauges are easy to read and well lit, the buttons are laid out in a sensible fashion with regard both to style and ergonomics, the fake wood doesn’t look fake, and the availible Nav system is universally regarded in all of the automotive press as the best example currently on the market.

If you want to bring toys into the equation, heated and air-condintioned front seats, heated rear seats, massaging front seats, full up and down back and forth recline and lumbar are all power for the drivers seat, plus there is memory which includes the mirrors. You can choose an interior ambient lighting option from a variety of colors, and even have a rear sunshade that pops up to keep glare from coming in through the back window. Panel gaps are virtually non-existant as well.

As an honest question, what makes an Acura, Lexus, or Buick LaCrosse interior superior?

I was able to sit in the new Taurus at NAIAS. It’s interior is pretty good for $30,000 car, but not a match for even Acura, which is itself no match for Lexus and Audi. The new Buick LaCrosse has a nicer interior, and sells for about the same price as the Taurus.

Official specs are less precise than they appear–there are ways to cheat them. The subjective impression in the back of the new Taurus is that it isn’t nearly as roomy as the old Taurus / Five Hundred. It might be about even with the RWD Audi and Lexus.

I haven’t been in the back seat of a current generation LS or A8, but according to Edmunds, the Taurus has more rear seat legroom than the A8 (front and rear) and more hip room than the LS (front and rear) but apparently Audi doesn’t publish hip room, and Lexus doesn’t publish leg room.

As far as interior quality, thus far I have only been able to see in person two preproduction SEL models, and both were very, very nice. The Autoblog review noted that the quality was Audi level, and I would agree, though I haven’t yet seen a SHO in person.

Sorry, but the new Taurus’ back seat isn’t nearly as roomy as that in an A8 or LS, and the interior quality is head full of hair away from those cars. It’s a nice car, but not that nice.

This is a car bigger than an Audi A8 or Lexus LS, with similar power, all of the same toys plus some extras, interior quality that is within a hair if not equal to the Luxury marks, and all for over $25,000 less. Hyundai proved there was a market for a premium sedan from a mainstream brand with the Genesis, I see the SHO as a similar vehicle.

And it will sell at deep discounts, too.

40k+ for this car with no manual tran and no serious brake and handling kit?

What is the point of this car at this price point?

“Let’s see …. 40 large for a SHO, or 40 large for a G8/GXP. Being a fan of north/south engines with RWD — plus the availability of a 6-Speed manual — I think I’ll take the GXP.”

I doubt that you will find one person among the B&B that would disagree with you, BUT….

Your chances of finding a 6-speed GXP are the about the same as GM regaining it’s 50% market share.

So, to “stay American” we’re down to one car. The 2010 SHO? Puh-leeeze. This is where my patriotism really gets tested.

But the press about the SHO’s poor brakes is what will set it back a bit. Then again, if it ain’t one thing (brakes), it’s another (the damn flappy paddle button things).

That said, I find that two tons of BMW driven at breakneck pace for more than a few minutes will eat their brakes… even when equipped with optional performance upgrades like twin piston calipers and slotted discs. I don’t expect a stock Ford mule to do much better.

Entertaining review. Probably not for your co-driver, though. But I agree that Ford is missing the point here… they really ought to be working on a Fusion SHO instead…

There’s a 9 inch difference between the 1st and 3rd gen Tauruses. The current generation is 4 inches beyond that. I think the problem is that the iconic Taurus is still the original, which was mid-size, and it hasn’t really been quite in that class for a while. At some point it ended up in the “Buick class”, and so they made it a premium full-size to match that.

All that said, I agree with Jerome10 in that a SHO Fusion would more closely align with the original Taurus SHO. Which really begs the question: Why did Ford really use the Taurus name on this car? The name had equity, to be sure. But that equity measured up to a decent mid size car that could be had mild to wild. Even taking the sad new car bloat into account, this new Taurus is more elephant than bull.