The Taurus SHO is the fastest, most expensive Ford sedan | Revelations with Jason Cammisa | Ep. 08

taurus now a north american car with the shape and the field we've never seen before taurus now there is a personal car that has exactly what we've been looking for for all of us who will not compromise board listen lord created taurus for us [Music] [Applause] lately [Music] in the early 1980s ford was in trouble big trouble on the verge of bankruptcy the company knew it had one shot left to save itself and so ford reorganized its structure to allow a team of designers and engineers to actually work together on a project rather than fighting with each other from their respective silos it was a revolutionary new way of designing a car at least for a dysfunctional car company and so they all worked together on the family sedan of the future with a budget of three billion dollars um that was three billion early 1980s dollars adjusted for inflation that's seven billion dollars today and that is ford's entire annual r d budget and i know you look at the tourists and you think no big deal but trust me this was a spaceship in 1986. this is what american sedans looked like when the tourists dropped its normalness today is a function of its incredible success then when the jelly bean debuted it looked like nothing anyone had ever seen before it had no grill bonded flush windows arrow doors that wrapped all the way into the roof it had words everywhere in english on every button lever feature and panel because ford knew that in the future people would like to read and it had something incredible it had flush headlights stop laughing that is a huge deal your department of transportation mandated those terrible sealed beam headlights in the 1940s and no amount of arguing would convince them to allow the vastly superior headlights that were available in the rest of the world to be used on cars sold in america until the geniuses at ford realized that the same government nitwits responsible for lighting were also responsible for fuel economy standards ford argued that the agency tasked with protecting people was actually killing them because without the aerodynamic advantage of flush mounted headlights they'd never be able to reach the mpg targets and ford won one of the very first beneficiaries of those flush lights was the 1986 ford taurus it was so futuristic looking that it wound up in every movie depicting the future ford couldn't keep up with the demand for the taurus its success didn't just save ford from bankruptcy the taurus became the best-selling car in the country what it didn't do was set the performance world on fire the jelly bean had debuted with an all-new v6 but it was as old school as the taurus was futuristic it had an iron block iron cylinder heads and push rods ugh some old american habits die hard it took three liters of displacement to make 140 horsepower and it was not quick until the show ford called it sho for super high output but enthusiasts quickly nicknamed it the show and at its heart was the shogun it started out as that new 3-liter vulcan v6 but was sent to yamaha in japan who designed and produced aluminum double overhead cam 4 valve per cylinder heads for it yamaha also fortified the bottom end and sent the completed engines back to ford in the u.s the result was 80 more horsepower from the same displacement think about that that's 60 percent more power that ford had just left on the table and by the way 25 percent more torque too the shogun revved 2 000 rpm past the vulcan's 5300 rpm redline holy to say nothing of how it looked you could stare at this bundle of snakes intake for hours and still not be able to fully visualize what's happening here but it's not just a piece of art it had two intake runners for each cylinder one long and skinny one that ran across from the plenum on the opposite side of the engine and then a short fat one that went straight down in at lower revs the engine breathes through the long runners to boost torque at higher rpms six additional throttle valves open so it can suck air through both those long runners and the short ones maximizing airflow and therefore power the show's v6 is limited to 7 300 rpm and i hear stories all over the internet about how it can actually rev all the way to 8500 but ford couldn't let that happen because the belt-driven accessories would explode please bear with me while i roll my eyes if that were the case ford would have just under-driven the belt accessories look the engine makes its peak power at 6200 rpm by 8500 it'd be 2300 rpm past its power peak and that means it'd be making like 180 horsepower or less so there'd be no reason to rev it that high saying this thing could rev to 8 500 rpm is like saying the taurus show could do a thousand miles on a single tank of gas if the taurus had a 50-gallon fuel tank which it doesn't there was no need for exaggeration 7 300 rpm put the show in the big leagues with a mazda 5-speed manual as the only available transmission the show was an absolute rocket it was the world's most powerful front-wheel drive car and it blew to 60 miles an hour in like half the time of the regular one and then threw the quarter mile in 15.2 seconds at 93 and onto a top speed of 140 miles an hour to put that in perspective ferrari's newly updated four-seater the monday alt was just a one mile an hour quicker through the quarter mile and given an unlimited stretch of autostrata yes the ferrari was faster but just four miles an hour faster with the exception of the bmw m5 and 750il the show was the quickest and fastest sedan you could buy by the way it handled two it matched the ferrari on the skid pad if there's one thing in this entire video that's gonna piss the entire internet off it's the knowledge that the ford taurus show beat the bmw e30 325i in a sports sedan comparison test after it wiped the floor with the bmw in acceleration top speed slalom and skid pad okay so clearly the magazine guys were a little drunk the show won because it had a much bigger interior but the point is that the show was far more than just a straight-line rocket even the base taurus was a handler but the show stayed incredibly flat up to its very stable limits okay very stable is code for terminal understeer but this is an enormous five-passenger front-wheel drive sedan and besides the shogun was scheduled to appear in a car that wouldn't understeer ford was going to make a mid-engined french-built answer to the pontiac fiero the gn34 as it was called was killed before it went into production but it was scheduled to use a version of the yamaha v6 at least until ford's new 4 cam v8 was ready contrary to internet lure though the shogun wasn't designed for the gn it was always part of the taurus project and why not while the taurus was being designed the average age of an american car buyer was 48 years old compared to just 35 for an import buyer young buyers are really important to car companies less they become oldsmobile and buick so you can bet that the taurus was designed to attract younger buyers and young people like power young urban professionals otherwise known as yuppies sure loved their bmw 325is in fact they'd snatched up 60 thousand of them a year so ford thought it would have no problem selling a third as many shows in its first year ford sold 15 and a half thousand shows not bad but sales plummeted after that to only 8 000 units a year ferrari makes more cars than that these days for 1992 the tourists got a facelift which boosted sales of the regular taurus but not the show but in 93 ford finally gave the show an automatic transmission with a board out 3.2 liter showgun tuned for an additional 15 pound-feet of torque it was almost as quick as the stick thanks to the sales finally exceeded that 20 000 mark for one year and then they went right back to where they had been look selling eight or ten thousand cars a year isn't necessarily a failure but ford was selling 400 000 tauruses a year and it's basically inconceivable that only two out of every hundred people chose the fast one but i have a theory as to why right now mitsubishi is in some ways where ford was in the early 1980s they're in financial trouble and they haven't made a great car in a decade now imagine that mitsubishi comes out with a new family sedan that looks so futuristic it changes the way cars are designed it wins every single of the year award and it quickly becomes the best selling car in all the land and a couple years later when they're everywhere they come out with a three pedal version with enough firepower under the hood to keep up with a ferrari in a straight line and enough suspension and brakes to match it in the corners it would be the performance bargain of your lifetime at like 45 000 bucks would you buy one no because there are 600 of them in the walmart parking lot all driven by lululemon wearing mommies who were like this is the perfect car for my kids and if you put a spoiler on it well then you just look like an idiot and that's why nobody bought the original tourist show it wouldn't have mattered if they put a three foot tall spoiler on the back it was still a taurus speaking of spoilers i'm not going to even mention the follow-up show which would win an award for being the world's only walrus-shaped v8 powered front-wheel drive fall from grace or the one after it which was an suv-based land yacht of a sedan with an engine not called show anything but the original show like every legend it has the right pedigree of a special engine low production numbers and a revolutionary design the only thing wrong with it is that it's a victim of the almost incomprehensible success of the regular taurus so it looks like every other jelly bean on the road unless you know what you're looking for have you driven a ford lately are we sure the thinking [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so you're just going to keep the ferrari framed out the entire time right yep okay action i'm not some rich youtuber asking you to like and subscribe hey up up up up up up up up up up keep the ferrari out i'm an automotive journalist asking you to like and subscribe and that's because that's how youtube works if you don't click those buttons youtube doesn't know you liked what you've just seen and isn't going to show you any more of it and if you don't like what you've just seen well join the club and by that i mean the hagerty drivers club which gets you access to this award-winning magazine as well as discounts on amazing stuff and if if you still don't like what you've seen well then just leave a nasty comment because that's how the internet works i need to go clean that up

Channel: Hagerty

Views: 2,725,638

Keywords: Hagerty, Classic Car, Classic Cars, Hagerty Drivers Club, collector car, enthusiast car, collector cars, Taurus, Taurus Commercial, Ford commercial, Taurus for us, Vulcan V6, Yamaha V6, Taurus E30, SHO sales numbers

Id: 5VTRhCC3gZI

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 01 2021