Free The End of Detroit by Micheline Maynard

hit the market. As development of the new Taurus proceeded, company officials were determined that Taurus had to remain the country’s best-selling car. So Ford’s marketing arm laid on every trick they could think of to expand Taurus’s sales. They poured more Tauruses into rental car fleets. They piled on incentives, such as rebates and discounted lease deals, hoping to attract as many customers as they could. In the months right before the new Taurus was introduced, the offers got even more generous, with payments of as little as $199 a month on a Taurus lease, and rebates of $500 or more per car.
    The deals worked in one unfortunate sense: Having heard and read all the ads for Taurus bargains, customers came to understand that the Taurus could always be had for a song—exactly the opposite of the upscale image that Ford wanted to achieve. When the new version came out, car shoppers came into dealerships expecting to get the same deals as before. What they found was a double disappointment: First, the looks of the Taurus had changed dramatically from the familiar car that had become such a beloved family sedan. It was as if a teddy bear had put on spandex and a wig. Because its appearance had changed so much, the Taurus also seemed smaller than the vehicle it replaced, and customers complained that the new version wasn’t as roomy inside. And the new Taurus cost hundreds to thousands of dollars more than its predecessor. The cheapest version cost close to $20,000, and once options were loaded on the car, the price approached $23,000. That was a steep price for a family car in the mid-1990s—still more than some Camry and Accord models cost today.
    Thus, instead of a comfortable car that could be purchased at a reasonable price, the Taurus had become smaller, more expensive and less eye-pleasing. Dealers, who had ordered thousands of the cars in advance, weren’t happy. But Ford provided them with an alternative that would prove to be another blow to Taurus. By the time the restyled Taurus reached the market, another Ford vehicle was entering its second generation: the Explorer. Introduced in 1990, Explorer had broken new ground in the SUV market. Until then, sport utilities emphasized their practicality and usefulness. The focus was primarily on the ways they could be used to traverse difficult territory and to transport camping gear and other equipment. The few people who bought them for regular driving gravitated to Jeeps, and the best-heeled moved to Range Rovers.
    Ford, however, had seen how popular those vehicles were and experimented in the 1980s with a smaller version of its big Bronco SUV, called the Bronco II. Built on a truck chassis, the Bronco II’s quality was subpar and its ride was uncomfortable, yet it offered a window into a potential market—namely, an SUV that could substitute for a car. Ford tapped into that market with Explorer, which by the mid-1990s was outselling many of the cars in Ford’s lineup.
    This was made abundantly clear when the new Taurus reached showrooms. Should consumers shake their heads in dismay at its radical new design and higher price, dealers could walk them over to an Explorer and suggest they give it a try. Some versions of the Explorer were even more expensive than the Taurus, but that seemed okay, given just how much bigger a vehicle the buyers were getting. Dealers were delighted to convince customers to make the switch, since profits on the Explorer were in the thousands of dollars, versus a few hundred on the Taurus. And customers were happy, both because SUVs were becoming chic and because they could avoid the hassle of shopping elsewhere. “They didn’t even have to leave the showroom,” said Brauer.
    The defections from Taurus were immediate. By 1997, Taurus had slipped from first place to third in the best-selling-car list, behind the Camry and the Accord. Ford seemed to take forever to respond to dealers’ complaints that the car cost too much, most