Word: tauruses
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...TAURUS: Try squash. You've been at Harvard for a while, and it has never made any sense, but there comes a time in the life of every young person when he or she just gets it. It's a conceptual thing. It's intuition. And it's your time to start playing, baby...
...going to write a 350-page book on redesigning an American car, it might as well be the 1996 Ford Taurus...
...almost a decade, since the first Taurus was introduced in the mid 1980's, it had been a resounding success. The company had been in sour economic shape, but the car soon became the best-selling automobile in America, a ubiquitous vehicle in suburban driveways across the country. But compared to the European smooth-curved cars flooding the market, the old Taurus was beginning to look boxy. Tampering with it was ultimately necessary, but also immensely dangerous: as Mary Walton writes in Car, it was "like reformulating Coca-Cola...
Unfortunately, the most interesting sections of the book--when Walton moves away from the minute intricacies of constructing the Taurus and focuses on the larger issues surrounding car building in America--are all too rare. Walton explains, in an enlightening digression, that the design of the "'96 Ford Taurus was unique in that the company set out to make a car in the Japanese mold--they aimed to spend more money and less time, and to create something which could rival the smooth precision of a Toyota-built automobile. In short, their mission statement was 'Beat Camry."' In another chapter...
...even inexplicable, choices. For instance, in 1983 the company suspended production of the Chevrolet Malibu, the country's favorite family car and one of its all-time best sellers, totaling more than 6.5 million cars in a 20-year run. A year later, Ford claimed that turf with the Taurus. In the next 10 years, Chevrolet and Pontiac sales slid 37%, Cadillac's 42%, Buick's 49%. Oldsmobile's crashed 71%. The company lost a total of $30 billion from 1990 through 1992, a cash drain that amounted to nearly $50 million for every working day every year for three...