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In 1989, Detroit's sexiest and best-selling family sedan got a potency "enhancement" far more effective than the ones clogging your spam filters these days. So smitten were we by the performance-envelope enlargement a rev-happy twin-cam Yamaha V-6 engine and starchy suspenders provided that we actually described the Taurus SHO as "America's BMW." That may sound like the sort of hyperbolic overstatement one came to expect from a Craigslist erotic-services listing, but indeed most SHO track-test numbers approximated the BMW 535i's for well under half the price. While the SHO's restrained Q-ship exterior drew praise, the rest of the car was boy-racer brash-all snarling engine, harsh impacts, and wiggling torque steer. Over 10 years of development and 106,465 sales, the refinement improved steadily, but even the final V-8 variants still treated their BMW-taunting drivers to a cacophony of enthusiastic noises and vibrations.
Those original SHOwners are all at least 10 years older now, and Ford reckons they've outgrown wild-'n'-crazy sport sedans, so the new-millennial SHO is a suave sophisticate. As we noted last month, the entire Taurus lineup now sports almost a third again the length, girth, and mass of the aero-sleek original. Fortunately, the new SHO is nearly two-thirds again as powerful, producing 365 well-mannered horses and 350 pound-feet of twist (the first-gen made 220 and 200)...Continued
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