Taking Back the Hearts of Middle America

2008 Ford Taurus X Limited wagon

2008 Ford Taurus X Limited wagon (Ford Motor Co.)

Jack Telnack stood proudly in front of the car that would return Ford to relevance. The year was 1985. The place was the styling studio at Ford's headquarters in Dearborn, Mich. The car was the Ford Taurus, which was being readied for 1986 model-year launch in the United States.

John J. Telnack was Ford's global vice president of design, a dapper and urbane sort who had caught the attention of his bosses with renderings of the 1979 Ford Mustang sports car and the compact 1984 Ford Tempo sedan.

But Telnack, a maverick within Ford's conservative executive corps, was standing in front of his biggest career risk yet -- and the company's biggest gamble to reclaim the loyalty of middle-American families who had defected to Japan's Honda Accord and Toyota Camry.

"What do you think?" Telnack said, gesturing toward the strikingly oval Taurus sedan.

I was stunned. "What have you done with the box?" I asked. "This car has no corners!"

Telnack laughed. For years, Ford had been losing sales and market share by aping the uninspired boxy styling of domestic rivals General Motors and Chrysler. It was as if the Detroit Three had decided that Middle America deserved nothing more than funereal designs augmented by splashes of exterior chrome and interiors festooned with polyurethane forestry. That the American public was turning away from that linear boredom didn't seem to matter. What didn't sell on merit -- and little of what came from Detroit in those days -- could always be sold with consumer rebates.

That is why Telnack's Taurus was so bold, so wonderfully different. It said that style and quality mattered. It said that Middle America deserved a car to smile about. And for nearly a decade after its introduction, the Taurus sold exceptionally well, dethroning the Accord as the best-selling car in America in 1992.

But in the interim, Ford had fallen in love with trucks -- the bigger, the better. Like a fickle lover unmindful of the good thing already in hand, it neglected the Taurus, allowed it to slip into oblivion and walked away from it in 2006.

That was dumb.

The Taurus was a good brand turned into an also-ran by corporate abdication of continuous product improvement. There was nothing wrong with the name. There was something wrong with the car.

Thankfully, Alan Roger Mulally, who took over as Ford's president and chief executive officer last September, quickly reversed the error. He scrapped the go-nowhere Ford 500 moniker that had replaced the Taurus name and restored the Taurus badge to its rightful place -- on the flagship, bread-and-butter big sedans and wagons Middle America wants and deserves.

It was more than a name change, as amply demonstrated by the all-wheel-drive 2008 Ford Taurus X Limited wagon driven for this column. Granted, the new Taurus wagon shares many of the underpinnings of the ill-named Ford Freestyle wagon/crossover utility vehicle it is replacing. So what?