How Good Is the New Taurus?

Every moviegoer knows that sequels are rarely as exciting as the original. That’s true for cars, too—including the 2010 Ford Taurus, which went on sale earlier this year. Given the rampant popularity of the first Taurus, this sequel has a tough act to follow.

As many family-car lovers may remember, the 1986 Taurus (base price: $9,645) caused quite a sensation with its sleek, Euro-sporty design—a huge departure from the era’s boxy, boring models from other American and Japanese automakers. Ford [F] was recovering from then record losses in the early 1980s, and the Taurus led a comeback in which the company outearned GM (an amazing feat back then) for the first time in more than 60 years. Indeed, in the early 1990s the Taurus became America’s best-selling car, dethroning the Honda [HMC] Accord.

Then in 1996 came Taurus 2.0. Call it corporate narcissism or just plain dumb, but company designers employed a kind of extreme styling in which everything—the rear window, the dashboard panel—was shaped like Ford’s [NYSE: F] iconic “blue oval” logo. Sales plunged, though that didn’t matter much because Ford was emphasizing high-profit SUVs. Ford let the Taurus die in 2004, until new CEO Alan Mulally revived the name two years ago on a car best described as a placeholder.

Enter the 2010 version—which, while it has a few flaws, is a comfortable and stylish full-size sedan. For its part, the company hopes the 2010 Taurus, the first truly new version in 14 years, will help spark its latest corporate revival (it’s the only American car company to avoid bankruptcy) just as the first Taurus did. “We’re going to make lightning strike twice,” says Pete Reyes, the new car’s enthusiastic chief engineer. But if so, the impact will be mostly symbolic; Ford’s own sales estimates are reportedly modest—less than 25 percent of the 400,000-plus cars that the first Taurus sold in its peak years. One reason: The new Taurus is a full-size sedan, a niche that’s much smaller than the midsize segment occupied by the original Taurus.

The new Taurus carries a base price of $25,995 for a car with a hefty 3.5-liter V-6 engine packing 263 horsepower and a standard six-speed automatic transmission. That compares well with Toyota’s [TM] entry in the full-size-sedan ranks, the Avalon, which has a nearly identical power train but carries a base price that’s almost $2,000 higher. The Taurus’s gas mileage is 18 city, 28 highway—similar to Avalon’s.

What really makes the new Taurus distinctive is the plethora of optional high-tech equipment, such as the 365-horsepower twin-turbo V-6 in the Taurus SHO (Super High Output). The SHO’s gas-mileage rating is 17 in the city and 25 on the highway—not much of a penalty for that much extra horsepower. And the SHO can hit 75 miles an hour before the end of a freeway on-ramp. (Don’t ask how I know.)

Other Taurus options include all-wheel drive, heated and cooled front seats, heated rear seats, a gas pedal that can be adjusted to suit the driver’s height, and voice-activated electronic controls. Beyond those goodies is “forward-looking radar” that senses how fast you’re approaching the car in front of you, adaptive cruise control that keeps a preset distance from that car and collision warning that hits the brakes automatically when you get too close. Ford engineers say these features will let you drive from Detroit to Chicago without touching the brake or the accelerator, but they don’t recommend trying it. The bad news here is that the optional high-tech wizardry can push the price of a loaded Taurus north of $38,000—by which time you are bumping BMW, Mercedes and Lexus territory, albeit for the smaller cars in their luxury lineups. You have a choice, then, between a bigger, more tech-laden car and a more prestigious marque.

The new Taurus has a comfortable and attractive interior, though some of the plastic is tacky instead of plush. And while its muscular body styling isn’t a game changer like the original’s was, it’s both subtle and sharp. Case in point: the horizontal crease in the front fender and door, which fades away in the rear door but then picks up again in the rear fender. The chief negative is the car’s weight—4,015 pounds for the front-wheel-drive version, which is 400 pounds more than the heaviest Toyota Avalon. The trade-off is that the Taurus is bigger than the Avalon, especially in the trunk (20.1 cubic feet versus the Avalon’s 14.4). How many golf bags do you want your car to carry?

When Ford’s new subcompact Fiesta, developed in Europe, hits the U.S. next year, the blue-oval brand will have an appealing top-to-bottom car lineup, with the Taurus and the Fiesta as bookends and the midsize Fusion and compact Focus in between. Taurus may not be revolutionary, but Ford finally has a worthy successor to the original.