Free The End of Detroit by Micheline Maynard Page A

likely because it simply didn’t want to admit that its gamble to go upscale had been wrong. It eventually did make a cheaper version available, but despite the uproar over the car’s dramatic styling, it left the Taurus’s appearance alone. Changing it right away would have meant millions of dollars in unbudgeted engineering expense. And by then, Ford had other priorities on its hands—namely, trucks. Jacques Nasser, who had become head of the Ford Automotive Group and was angling to become CEO, was convinced that the auto company needed to push full-bore into the SUV market. He saw all kinds of opportunities: Full-sized SUVs, bigger than Explorer—a vision that eventually led to the Expedition and the gargantuan Excursion. Small SUVs, such as the vehicle that Ford would call the Escape. Luxury SUVs, like the Lincoln Navigator. He also came up with an Explorer clone for Mercury called the Mountaineer. The company was SUV crazy, and its engineering resources were deployed to focus primarily on trucks.
    As a result the Taurus, badly in need of attention, got left behind. “They thought totally corporate. They said, ‘We’ve got all these truck products coming out, and they’re going to be high margin,’” said a former Ford executive who is familiar with the decisions that were made on the Taurus. “They said, ‘We can just let the Taurus sit there.’” Because of the company’s obsession with trucks and its unwillingness to save its best-selling car, it took Ford five years, until the year 2000, to do anything about the styling that had been such an immediate disaster. On its next go-round, Ford calmed down the Taurus’s appearance, removing the ovals and simplifying the interior, so that the car had a cleaner, understated look. It had cut back somewhat its flood of sales to fleets and rental car agencies, which had sliced into the car’s profitability and destroyed its carefully crafted image.
    But the changes hardly mattered by this time, because Taurus had long since been eclipsed again by the imports. In 2002, the Camry once again reigned as the nation’s best-selling car, a title it has held since capturing it from Taurus in 1997. Accord was slightly behind, while Taurus trailed the pair by thousands of sales. Its sales in 2002 were nearly 100,000 fewer than at its peak. Ford executives belatedly admitted that they had made a major mistake. Speaking to journalists at the Chicago Auto Show in 2003, Ford executive vice president Jim Padilla said Taurus didn’t deserve what Ford had done to it, saluting the car as if it were a fallen comrade.
    Already gone from many buyers’ shopping lists, the Taurus is destined to never again hold the crown as the nation’s best-selling car. Ford is converting one of the factories that built the Taurus to produce the Freestyle, its first entry into the market for crossover vehicles, a kind of SUV that is a combination car and truck that it plans to introduce in 2004 as one of three models it has slated to compete for family buyers. But once again, Ford will trail its competition. The Japanese are already setting the pace with crossover vehicles like the Toyota Highlander and the Lexus RX 330, which are in their second generation, the Honda Pilot and the Nissan Murano, while Chrysler brought out the Pacifica in 2003. Later this decade, Ford also will introduce a family sedan, the Ford 500, and plans a hybrid-electric vehicle, the Futura, counting on those two vehicles and the Freestyle to fill the place in the market that Taurus alone once occupied.
    Soon to be extinct, the Taurus is already a museum piece. The first one sits on display at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, just a couple of blocks away from the styling studio where the first Taurus came to light 20 years ago. A sign tells the story of how Detroit once beat the Japanese and how the Taurus saved Ford from disaster. But the display doesn’t go on to say how Ford then lost the game