Junkyard Gem: 1986 Ford Taurus GL Sedan
In 1985, Ford’s midsize sedan offering was the angular, rear-wheel-drive LTD, a car that looked and drove like the 1970s design it was (do not confuse the Fox-platform LTD with the unrelated and much bigger Panther-platform LTD Crown Victoria of this era). Though Ford did have modern, efficient small cars to sell Americans that year the Tempo and the Escort — the lack of a strong competitor in the all-important battle with cars such as the Chevrolet Celebrity (and its many A-Body siblings), Plymouth Reliant (and its many K-Car siblings), plus such increasingly threatening imports as the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord had become a real problem in Dearborn. The 1986 model year would change all that, however, because that’s when the brand-new Taurus hit the scene and became an instant sales hit. Here’s one of those first-year Tauruses, now leaving the road after 36 years of service.
The original Taurus stayed in production all the way through the 2007 model year, with some facelifts and chassis improvements along the way, long past the era in which the midsize sedan was Americans’ preferred means of getting around. Even after that, the Taurus name proved so beloved that Ford revived it a few more times, with the last North American Tauruses coming off the assembly line in 2018. Even today, the Taurus name lives on in China.
It’s hard to imagine how radical this car looked when it was new, because everybody went straight to the wind tunnel to make more aerodynamic designs immediately after the 1986 Taurus hit the streets, and it wasn’t long before most cars looked a lot like it. To be fair, Audi beat Ford to that smooth-curves/flush-glass design by a few years, but Audi 5000s were very uncommon sights on our roads then (and 5000 sales were about to fall off a cliff).
This is a GL, which was the second-from-the-top Taurus trim level in its introductory year (just below the loaded LX but well above the manual-transmisssion-equipped MT5 and prole-grade L).
The MSRP on this car came to $11,322, or about $30,605 in 2022 dollars. The very cheapest Taurus L four-door cost just $9,645 ($26,070 today). Meanwhile, your local Honda dealer would sell you a new Accord DX sedan for $9,679, but you had to accept a mandatory manual transmission at that price (price with automatic: $10,149).
The GL came with an automatic transmission and a V6 engine as base equipment, years before American-market Accords and Camrys offered a V6. This 3.0-liter pushrod Vulcan made 140 horsepower, while the Tempo-sourced four-banger in the L and MT5 was rated at just 88 (struggling) horses. The Vulcan had its debut in the 1986 Taurus and went on to have a successful career that stretched well into our current century; it was neither smooth-running nor particularly efficient, but it got the job done.
The GL came with such niceties as an AM/FM stereo radio and remote power mirrors thrown in for free, but cruise control, air conditioning, power windows, power seats, and other features we take for granted today cost extra. This car appears to have been optioned fairly heavily.
Ford used five-digit odometers on these cars, so we can’t know how many miles this one traveled during its long life. I’m willing to bet that the total was much more than 2,918 miles.
In fact, the backyard rattle-can green paint job (the original paint was Medium Gray Charcoal Metallic) and rope-through-grille hood tie-down tell us that this car probably drove at least 202,918 miles and might have traveled better than a half-million.
The Taurus— and just about every other American-market vehicle that wasn’t a truck or truck-shaped car— fell victim in large part to another Ford product: the fantastically successful and influential Ford Explorer, which first appeared as a 1991 model. Taurus sales waned as Explorer sales waxed, but they started from such a high point that true relevance really only dimmed for the Taurus (and its Mercury-badged sibling, the Sable) in the early years of the 2000s.
Unusually, all the hype in this ad about Ford’s new philosophy turned out to be true. Be sure to stay for the ad for the AH-64 Apache!
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